🎂 Shields is 10 years old 🎉

[chris48s]

Well I am a few hours early. The first commit was made on the morning of Jan 30, 2013. Reaching this milestone matters: A project does not survive for a decade if it is not providing some value.

This seems like an important opportunity to both thank some of the people and companies who have made it happen and also reflect on where the project is and some of the things this community has achieved over that time.

First of all, shields is more than one thing. If you see one of these in a README.md, there's a decent chance it was either:

• served from shields.io itself
• generated using our badge-maker NPM package
• served by someone who hosts their own instance using our docker image
• based on our specification

🛡️ Shields.io

The usage stats for shields.io constantly blow my mind.

• There are 1.2 million public github READMEs containing one or more shields.io badges. That is just public repos on GitHub. Our badges are on GitHub, NPM, PyPI, Ruby Gems, Rust Crates... If people build software there, shields badges are on it.
• We serve over a billion requests per month across fly.io and CloudFlare. On a busy day we serve over 40 million in the space of a day. We have no idea how many we serve from further downstream proxies and caches. I'd wager that number is larger again than the number we serve from our own infrastructure.
• Despite a simple text SVG badge image clocking in at just over 1kb, we transfer around 2TB of bandwidth per month.

💰 Funding

Of course, all that doesn't come for for free. All of this is funded by the donations of our generous sponsors. Hundreds of individuals and companies have donated to fund this via OpenCollective. We are thankful for every single donation and all of our sponsors play their part. I'd like to particularly draw attention to the donations made by our three most generous financial sponsors:

• Octopus Deploy
• Git Guardian
• Northwoods Software

Each of these companies has donated over $1,000 total over the years to keep funding our activities and we literally would not be able to fund running the service at this scale without them.

📦 Badge-maker

It almost pales into insignificance compared to the numbers for shields.io itself, but our badge-maker NPM library is quietly chugging away and generating images in the innards of a wide variety of other projects (as well as shields.io itself, of course). Badge-maker is consumed by over 500 other projects and has been downloaded over 900k times.

☁️ Self-hosting

This is the least visible section of our userbase and community. We have absolutely no idea how many self-hosted shields instances are out there, or how many badges they serve. We don't track or log them. Most are behind corporate firewalls, but we do know that our docker image has been downloaded 1.8 million times. I'll go out on a limb and say there are "a few".

📝 Specification

Before shields was a service or a library, it was a specification for how a badge should look. As well as everything listed above there many are other services and projects that follow their own path for implementation but conform to the shields specification when it comes to design. The specification is really where it all began and this seems like a good time to re-post Olivier's blog post an open source rage diamond which really spells out why shields was originally started and the principles that still guide us.

👥 The Community

There are a lot of big numbers to celebrate there, but all of that was made possible thanks to the work of the people who have given up their time to work on the project over the years. Over 400 different people have made one or more commits to this repo and the core team has worked through literally thousands of issues and pull requests (all of which was done by volunteers working in our spare time). We're proud to have accepted contributions from so many people from all over the world, including some who were making their first open source or first javascript contribution. It would be ridiculous to list them all, but I would like to specifically mention @calebcartwright @Daniel15 @espadrine @olivierlacan @PaulaBarszcz @paulmelnikow @platan @PyvesB and @RedSparr0w for their contributions over the years.

This is not even to mention the wider ecosystem of other shields and badge-adjacent projects, many of which are featured on https://github.com/badges/awesome-badges

🎀 Wrapping up

This may all come across as a bit of a self-indulgent waffle, but you'll have to forgive me for taking a moment to pause and reflect on some of the amazing things this community has achieved over the past 10 years. Then I'll get back to working on how we're going to keep this funny little corner of the internet going for another 10.

Finally, although I've highlighted some stats and contributions above, I am sure there are some important things I have missed (particularly from the early days of the project when I was not yet involved). If anyone would like to highlight anything, please comment. This seems like a pretty good place to collect those thoughts.

[TheLastGimbus]

Stuff like this makes me still like the internet :')

[Nliver]

Congratulations ！

[fairybow]

[olivierlacan]

Thank you so much for taking the time to celebrate @chris48s. I was going to pull up the blog post I wrote about Shields' inception "a few years ago" only to realize I published it... 9 years ago just a year after this all got started.

The decade part hurts a little bit, but every single time I land on a repository or project homepage and I see an array of useful and familiar badges synthesizing key facts, my heart warms and I feel so grateful for all of the people you mentioned and every single contributor ever who made this possible.

I mean this contribution graph is just wild.

❤️

[Andre601]

Is that graph accurate down to the day?
Like ~70 contributions on one day in 2020-2021? Or is it more condensed? Like per week or similar?

[Andre601]

First of all, congrats on the 10 years. If anything, reaching such an age for a site/Service that isn't a multi-billion tech corp *cough* Microsoft, Google, etc. *cough* is truly something.

Tho, I now want to quickly take the oportunity and ask this: What were some of the biggest controversis there was for this entire project? Surely within 10 years there were some moments that caused heated discussions from multiple viewpoints, right?

I'm honestly the most curious about if the domain choice of shields.io ever caused you some critique, given that .io domains seem to have somewhat of a bad reputation at times (Usually due to crappy (scam) sites using those). I'm really curious if that was a thing in the past you had to consider about...

[chris48s]

What were some of the biggest controversies there was for this entire project? Surely within 10 years there were some moments that caused heated discussions from multiple viewpoints, right?

I don't want to get too bogged down in negativity. This was intended to be a broadly positive thread, but I think it is reasonable to recognise that there have been lows as well as highs.

I think the thing we did that caused the most upheaval to the userbase was #8671 We knew it would be a big change. We tried to avoid it, we didn't make it lightly, and we put a lot of thought into how to approach it, but that definitely blew up way more than I expected and despite the thought we put into it. It also turned out there were some edge cases we had not considered. I don't feel bad about bringing this up as I'm happy to own that decision.

I do feel bad bringing this one up as it was someone else's mistake. We all make them, and I don't like to throw shade, but if I think of a low point in the history of the project #529 (comment) comes to mind. However I do think it was handled right (we were public and honest about what happened, all the tokens were revoked). Lessons were learned from that, and today we have much better security processes in place.

There have been some heated discussions too, but I don't tend to dwell on them so much.

I'm honestly the most curious about if the domain choice of shields.io ever caused you some critique, given that .io domains seem to have somewhat of a bad reputation at times (Usually due to crappy (scam) sites using those). I'm really curious if that was a thing in the past you had to consider about...

I am also not aware of any scammy associations with .io domains.

I am aware that there is some controversy around it though.

The .io TLD is for the British Indian Ocean Territory.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian_Ocean_Territory :

The only inhabitants are British and United States military personnel, and associated contractors, who collectively number around 3,000. The forced removal of Chagossians from the Chagos Archipelago occurred between 1968 and 1973. The Chagossians, then numbering about 2,000 people, were expelled by the UK government to Mauritius and Seychelles in order to construct the military base. Today, the exiled Chagossians are still trying to return, saying that the forced expulsion and dispossession was unlawful, but the UK government has repeatedly denied them the right of return. The islands are off-limits to Chagossians, tourists, and the media.

I've never seen anyone complain about it on this project, but I have seen it being raised on other projects and I'm aware of some projects or products that have migrated away from the .io TLD for this reason.

[olivierlacan]

The IO TLD was new enough not to have much of a reputation when I created and named Shields (2013). I might have missed it but I don’t ever recall anyone having a problem with it.