Merge pull request #4319 from szarnyasg/github-25k-stars

25k GH stars blog post

_posts/2024-12-16-github-25k-stars.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "25 000 Stars on GitHub"
+author: The DuckDB team
+thumb: "/images/blog/thumbs/github-25k-stars.svg"
+image: "/images/blog/thumbs/github-25k-stars.png"
+tags: ["release"]
+excerpt: "We have recently reached 25 000 stars on GitHub. We would like to use this occasion to stop and reflect about DuckDB's recent year and our future plans."
+---
+
+Our [GitHub repository](https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb) has just passed 25,000 stars. This is great news and since it is also the end of the year it is a good moment to reflect on DuckDB’s trajectory. There has been a lot of new and exciting adoption of DuckDB across the industry.
+
+We would like to highlight two main events that have happened this year:
+
+* We [released DuckDB 1.0.0]({% post_url 2024-06-03-announcing-duckdb-100 %}). This version introduced a stable storage format which guarantees [backwards compatibility and limited forward compatibility]({% link docs/internals/storage.md %}#compatibility).
+* We started the [DuckDB Community Extensions project]({% post_url 2024-07-05-community-extensions %}). Community extensions allow developers to contribute packages to DuckDB and users to easily install these extensions using the simple command `INSTALL xyz FROM community`.
+
+Besides the GitHub stars we have also observed a lot of growth in various metrics.
+
+* Each month, our website handles over 1.5 million unique visitors. In addition, we see over 300 TB in traffic from ca. 30 million extension downloads. Thanks again to Cloudflare for [sponsoring the project]({% link foundation/index.html %}#technical-sponsors) with free content delivery services!
+* In one year, we rose in the [DB Engines ranking](https://db-engines.com/en/ranking) from position 91 to 55 on the general board and from position 47 to 33 in the [relational board](https://db-engines.com/en/ranking/relational+dbms), which makes DuckDB the fastest growing relational system in the top-50.
+* We count [7.5M+ monthly downloads in PyPI](https://pypistats.org/packages/duckdb).
+* Maven Central downloads for the JDBC driver have also shot up, we now see over 500k+ downloads per month.
+
+We should note that we’re not glorifying those numbers and they are not a target per se for our much-beloved optimization in accordance with [Goodhart’s law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law). Still, they are just motivating to see grow.
+
+As an aside, we have recently opened a [Bluesky account](https://bsky.app/profile/duckdb.org) recently and are seeing great discussions happening over there. The account has already exceeded 4 thousand followers!
+
+Following our ancient two-year tradition, we hosted two DuckCon events, one in [Amsterdam]({% link _events/2023-10-06-duckcon4.md %}) and another in [Seattle]({% link _events/2024-08-15-duckcon5.md %}). We also organized the first [DuckDB Amsterdam Meetup]({% link _events/2024-10-17-duckdb-amsterdam-meetup-1.md %}).
+
+Next year, we are going to host [DuckCon in Amsterdam]({% link _events/2025-01-31-duckcon6.md %}), which is going to be the first event that we live stream in order to be more accessible to the growing DuckDB users in e.g. Asia.
+But for now, let’s sit around the syntax tree and be merry thinking about what’s to come.
+
+<div align="center">
+    <img src="/images/blog/duckdb-syntax-tree.jpg"
+    alt="Christmas tree with SQL syntax decorations"
+    width="800px"
+    /></div>