Chat Zulip

Last issue we had the pleasure of chatting to Zulip creator Tim Abbott. If you missed it we’d strongly advise you check it out. Tim started the KSplice project (for rebootless upgrades) before it was acquired by Oracle and in some ways Zulip grew out of that.

Zulip is a truly next-generation chat system. It marries the asynchronous benefits of something traditional like email, with the synchronous benefits of instant messaging. Thanks to its unique threading model, Zulip manages to sidestep the message overload now associated with both worlds.

Originally a private beta, was acquired by Dropbox in 2014 and became an open source project. Since then it’s soared in popularity and has a strong developer community. If you look at the GitHub metrics you’ll notice that a huge number of contributions come from people outside of the core team. 3.0 release back in July saw over 100 people contribute from all over the world. It also brought support for