One year ago we started the FOSS Fund at Salesforce. We were inspired by our friends at Indeed to give $10,000 every quarter to a project voted on by our open source contributors. We just finished our fourth and final round for the year and the winner is Prettier! Prettier is an opinionated code formatter. It enforces a consistent style by parsing your code and re-printing it with its own rules that take the maximum line length into account, wrapping code when necessary. Prettier can be run in your editor on-save, in a pre-commit hook, or in CI environments to ensure your codebase has a consistent style without devs ever having to post a nit-picky comment on a code review ever again!
We always reach out to the project and ask them some questions about how receiving support whether financial or through contributions helps the project. Christopher Chedeau shared how this impacts Prettier.
“As you can imagine, running a project that determines code style is a very challenging proposition. What has been awesome is having big companies like Salesforce adopt it, giving confidence to the rest of the ecosystem that the current set of rules is good and scales to entire companies. This way Prettier is not going to turn into a giant mess of configs and lose the reason it has been successful in the first place.”
Pierre-Marie Dartus, Software Engineering PMTS, who nominated Prettier, discusses the importance of the project to our company:
“Using a tool like Prettier to enforce consistent code formatting across multiple projects, in a company at Salesforce scale, is invaluable. No need to debate styling during code review, Prettier automatically formats your code for you. This also makes it easier to onboard new developers as they don’t have to spend time learning and accommodating to yet another code style guide. As of today, hundreds of internal projects [have] adopted Prettier. We are enjoying it so much internally that Prettier is now installed by default for all the new projects customers create on the Salesforce platform! Thanks again to the Prettier core team and all the contributors, this is an amazing project.”
As we close out our first year of FOSS Fund we are so thankful for the projects that have made our engineers’ jobs easier. We know we rely heavily on open source projects, and it’s important to us to give back! We had so many amazing projects nominated and want to give another shoutout to Homebrew, ESLint, Rollup, and Prettier who each received $10,000 this year.
The FOSS Fund is continuing on in 2021. Going forward, we’ll be rolling the top 3 projects from one quarter into the next quarter’s voting period to give the great projects who were nominated another chance at receiving funds. And we’ll keep following the lead of our open source contributors to support projects that matter the most to them!
If you are interested in starting a FOSS Fund at your company please reach out to us on Twitter at SalesforceEng.
