Ten Years of Bootstrap

@mdo August 19, 2021

Ten years ago today, we shipped the first release of Bootstrap. Releasing it on GitHub was my first real plunge into open source—what an introduction! Here we are a decade later with one of the most widely used open source projects and frontend toolkits on the web. Happy birthday, Bootstrap—what a ride!

While numbers certainly don’t tell the whole story, Bootstrap has reached some incredible milestones over the past decade. Here are some highlights:

  • Over 2.5 billion pageviews for our docs. That’s more than 685,000 a day.
  • 394,000,000 npm downloads since 2015—over 131 million of which were in 2020 alone. That’s 180,000 a day over the last six years.
  • 50 million RubyGems downloads
  • 57 million NuGet downloads
  • 7.5 million Packagist installs
  • Used by over 22% of all websites
  • Used by 2.7 million projects on GitHub
  • Over 21,100 commits on GitHub with nearly 35,000 issues and pull requests

Hidden in all those numbers are millions and millions of people that interact with Bootstrap just by visiting the sites and apps built with it. It’s still mind-blowing to see what’s been built with it after over the years, especially with how it all started.

Back in early 2011, the two of us were just a couple of nerds working at Twitter—Jacob was an engineer working on internal tools, me a product designer working on ads. Our paths crossed when the project I was working on needed to have its own internal tools app built for managing Twitter ad campaigns. Over a few months, we started working more and more together before ultimately deciding to release our project to the world.

Here we are 10 years later, still just a handful of nerds doing what we love, contributing to open source, and having an impact on people’s lives through our work. Bootstrap continues to be a passion project for me, from major rewrites to new features and from a growing icon library to a full-blown marketplace. It’s been an incredible journey, and one that’s still going strong thanks to the community’s love and the support of a small group of maintainers over the years.

The maintainers and contributors deserve the utmost thanks and appreciation. Please join me in thanking them—and every other open source maintainer!—whenever and however frequently you can. While this list can never fully represent all the contributions made to Bootstrap, I want to give a special shoutout to maintainers past and present, and some of the most prolific contributors.

Thank you again, folks. And to everyone who has used Bootstrap over the years, thank you for making a decade of building with Bootstrap possible. Cheers to whatever comes next, and see you soon for our next release.

<3,
@mdo