Riemann’s Next Chapter

Riemann has been a side project for three years, built in spare hours around a full-time job. That arrangement let the author add features as his employers needed them, but it also meant the backlog of community requests kept growing. Now he’s decided to work on Riemann full-time, at least for the foreseeable future, and is asking the community for help to make that sustainable.

The Work Ahead

The next year or two has a substantial roadmap, much of it driven by direct requests from users. High on the list are protocol changes—high-resolution timestamps, group support, pubsub, and UDP drop-rate estimation—plus a broader websockets dashboard. Beyond that, the author wants index state to survive restarts, config reloading without downtime, and a SQL-backed index for faster queries and state sync across multiple Riemann servers. High-availability clustering via Zookeeper, a historical data store with a query interface, and an order-of-magnitude throughput improvement round out the plan.

Funding the Effort

The author lives in San Francisco and estimates a burn rate of about $2,800 per month. He’s giving himself a $5,000 runway from savings and plans to work on Riemann daily: writing docs, triaging the growing set of pull requests from contributors like Pyr, Banjiewen, and Perezd, and providing support on Freenode (#riemann) and the mailing list. He also wants to meet users directly to understand their needs.

Support can come in three forms:

  • Volunteer contributions—feature requests, how-to guides, failing tests, bugfixes, and new features will all get full consideration.
  • Employment—a job that keeps at least half the time devoted to Riemann, working in high-level languages with a team he respects, would give the project a steady home and direct influence over its direction.
  • Donations—general funding extends the runway; earmarked donations buy focused work on a specific capability, visualization, or integration. He’ll work closely with donors, in person or remote, and sign NDAs as long as broadly useful functionality still lands in the open-source projects. Sponsors get acknowledged in the docs and website.

To keep an honest timetable for potential employers, earmarked donations are only accepted for a few weeks at a time, or on a prorated refund basis if he accepts a job offer before the work is done. If independent funding interest is strong, he’ll block out longer stretches. Questions and offers go to [email protected].