Lucky 13 Lobsters

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Lucky 13 Lobsters

Hey folks,

Lobsters launched on July 3, 2012, making the site 13 years old today!

We've had a busy year, so we now have 18,395 users who've submitted 115,784 stories, written 590,415 comments, and cast 3,964,793 votes. The charts on /stats show that discussions are more active than ever. If you're curious to dig in, I'll run your queries, especially during office hours. The next one of those is at 9 AM server time, about an hour from now.

I've been doing office hours about 9 months and it's been valuable, though not at all how I expected. I thought we'd have more questions, queries, and conversations about the site. Instead it's led to a growing wave of sustained contributions to the codebase. Looking at the last year, I'd like to especially thank the following repeat contributors for their contributions:

  • @rahul1990gupta PRs who set up ActiveJob/Solid Queue, brought our asset pipeline up to current rails, and added a Docker dev env to help new contributors
  • @chamlis PRs who has modernized our CSS to correct more longstanding layout/form issues than I could count, reduced our dependency on JS for core features, and is currently making the big, sensitive update to the markdown rendering of every comment (in addition to being a regular contributor to office hours streams with an uncanny ability to find useful resources and diagnose bugs)
  • kernal053 (he hasn't chosen to publicly link this account + his github) PRs who added the hat doffing feature, fixed up the forms for editing hats and stories, and added the 'last read' marker to /comments
  • @byroot PRs who helped diagnose performance and memory problems, and brought us up to Rails 7.2
  • @thomas0 thomasdziedzic PRs who fixed bugs in dev setup and is currently rewriting notifications
  • @gmem PRs who moved emails to Action Mailbox and set up Active Storage
  • @355e3b who paired with me (sir not appearing in this git log) to migrate our deployment tooling
  • Next year: you? We have many open bugs and feature requests and I try to label good first issues to make it easy to get started.

The theme in this last year of development has been cleaning up accumulated tech debt, mostly as we've had the opportunity to replace our homegrown features with Rails versions. Lately I've spent more time reviewing contributions than writing code myself, which is a wonderful milestone in the viability of the codebase. (Probably means fewer bugs yolod into prod, too.)

Having mentioned that commenting is at an all-time high and in that same spirit of bringing on contributors, I'd like to invite people to DM or email me (not comment) if they're interested in becoming mods on the site. This mostly means tidying story titles or tags, removing business news, and infrequently reminding people to be kind to one another. Please tell me about what you'd be interested in helping with, whether you have experience that's relevant to be a mod, and what you'd like to see from the site. I'll follow up with you individually from there.

Maintenance aside, let's look back at the year's top stories and review our upvoted comments and stories for favorites.

Previously: 2013 2016 2017 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024

Discussion 25 comments · 449 points · pushcx · 2025-07-03
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