It’s been almost five months since the first version of the Comprehensive Kerbal Archive Network (CKAN) was released. What started as a desire to make it easier to install and manage Kerbal mods has now turned into a system that’s used by tens of thousands of users, along with hundreds of contributors to our metadata and code. The CKAN has been a huge success.

Last month, I posted saying that we were looking for an infrastructure sponsor to help us with our growing needs, and I’m delighted to say that search has been successful. We’re very grateful to Amazon Web Services for their ongoing support. With the help of AWS, we’re not only ensuring that mods are indexed quickly and our code is continuously tested, but we’re also mirroring thousands of past and present mod releases. We’re looking forward to future CKAN clients being faster and more reliable than ever before.

Our biggest challenges at the moment are not technical, but instead time pressures faced by many of our key contributors. All the CKAN developers work on the project in their spare time, and we have some outstandingly talented people. However that means they’re also starting companies, running successful businesses, jumping out of airplanes, or having rich and varied lives that compete for their time.

In order to ensure the continued development and support of the CKAN, I’d like to move it out of the things I do when I have spare time, and instead into the things I do as part of my job, with regular code sprints, scheduled work days, progress reports, and accountability.

I run my own software consultancy, so having the CKAN as part of my job is entirely possible, but it means turning down other projects to make time for it. To see if this is possible, I’ve created a patreon page to support my CKAN development efforts. I’ve already got co-working space and a huge amount of coffee booked for the 12th April, so if we hit our first funding milestone by that time, it will be the first CKAN sprint.

Regardless of whether we make the funding goals or not, I still intend to work on the CKAN during my spare time as I always have. However if successful I’m looking forward to being able to devote more and regular hours to CKAN development and support.

For everyone who has contributed to the project, thank you for helping make it the incredible success that it is today. It’s been a pleasure working with you, and I look forward to doing even more of the same in the future.

If you’d like to support me in developing the CKAN, or simply learn more about my plans, please visit my patreon page for more information.

Many thanks,

~ Paul (CKAN project founder)