Rush Stack is an open-source collection of specialized tooling for working with the world's largest source code repositories.
Providing support is often a challenge for open-source projects, especially when maintainers are juggling internal investigations at work alongside their open-source correspondence. Yet to be successful, the Rush Stack community needs to systematically handle questions and feedback.
Zulip makes it easy for the Rush Stack community to provide the level of support required for mission-critical enterprise tools. “With Zulip, we have a system that feels professional, where once a topic is opened, we can make sure that it gets resolved,” says Rush Stack maintainer Pete Gonzalez.
“With Zulip, we have a system that feels professional.”
— Rush Stack maintainer Pete Gonzalez
Choosing a chat product? Focus on the features that matter.
Pete Gonzalez started researching chat platform options for the Rush Stack community in early 2020, looking to replace Gitter. “I had worked on Yammer, and even wrote my own client, so I was thinking about chat apps very deeply,” Pete recalls. “Although chat apps may seem similar, there are actually many subtle design tradeoffs whose combination determines whether an app will work well for a particular use case.”
Rush Stack needed a space for maintainers and community members to have serious, long-running conversations. “Rush Stack discussions have the character of support tickets,” Pete explains. “Someone can ask a question that might take two years to finally solve.”
Pete identified Zulip as the best fit for the needs of the community. With Zulip’s topic-based organization, conversations can run their course, with the full context of the discussion easily at hand when someone has a new idea. “Zulip gives you control,” Pete points out. “You can edit or move messages to fix anything that might be incorrect or confusing, which is important for long-running discussions.”
“Zulip gives you control.”
— Rush Stack maintainer Pete Gonzalez
To make the transition, Rush Stack imported the project’s full chat history from Gitter into Zulip, making it an easily searchable resource. Enabling Zulip’s feature for logging in with GitHub meant that users didn’t have to make new accounts. Users could also control how their messages looked with familiar Markdown formatting.
“Zulip has better features for the way we use it”
Over the years, Pete had continued to keep an eye on the evolution of team chat products. “Compared to Discord, Slack, GitHub discussions… Zulip has better features for the way we use it,” he says.
Pete has seen open-source maintainers struggle to manage a Discord community: “There are all these people asking questions… If an important question scrolls out of view, how would you follow up? Maintainers end up giving up on community management, leaving casual participants to sort things out on their own.”
Slack’s paid plans, which start at $8.75/user/month, are unaffordable for community use. “You have to pay a lot for Slack history, and users can’t log in with their GitHub account,” Pete says. On the free plan, communities have access to just 90 days of message history, which is unworkable for a community with a large knowledge base and long-running investigations.
“Of all the apps I tested, Zulip’s approach stood out as the best fit for how we work.”
— Rush Stack maintainer Pete Gonzalez
Software that’s built in the open and always improving
Pete has been impressed by how Zulip handles user feedback. “I can go into the development community to talk to them, and often the tech lead of the team will reply,” he notes. “Even if their answer is that my request is a lower priority right now, there is context to understand that. New features are always being added, and with the team’s daily discussions being public, I can see what they are working on and why. It’s a really different dynamic from trying to make feature requests or bug reports for a closed source product with an invisible engineering team.”
“New features are always being added, and with the team’s daily discussions being public, I can see what they are working on and why.”
— Rush Stack maintainer Pete Gonzalez
Pete was pleased to learn that organizations can now allow public access to channels. It lowers the bar for people to view Zulip discussions that are linked from Rush Stack GitHub issues.
Pete has also seen Zulip’s onboarding experience transform over the past few years. “In the past, Zulip was optimized for daily users, and so had a bit of a learning curve for occasional Rush Stack participants. But the UX has improved a lot in this regard. The recent conversations view that’s been added has largely addressed the challenge for new users,” Pete says. This view lists the topics being discussed, and is also the go-to for Pete to check in on what’s happening.
“The folks who make Zulip listen to customers, and the product continues to improve.”
— Rush Stack maintainer Pete Gonzalez
Check out our guide on using Zulip for open source, and learn how Zulip helps communities scale!