4 Years of Bevy

It's Bevy's 4th birthday! If you haven't already, read Cart's post here. As part of this milestone, I would like to reflect on my journey in the Bevy developer community.

Wait... Bevy?!

Yeah! I contribute to Bevy, an open-source game engine written in Rust. I'm a relatively new contributor, having started in November of 2023¹, but I've accomplished a lot since then. I was inspired after reading the 0.12 announcement post, so I found an issue labeled D-Good-First-Issue and tried my best to complete it!

The change was simple, the review process went well, and it was merged only a day later. I was really excited that I had the chance to contribute to this cool piece of software that I looked up to.

Finding my place in it all

It wasn't until December where I began working on the aspect of Bevy that I now specialize in: Github Actions. I modified the workflow that publishes https://dev-docs.bevyengine.org to upload an artifact instead of force-pushing to the gh-pages branch. It took a few attempts, but in the end its result was safer and far less cursed.

The ranks of Bevy contributors are chock-full of ECS enthusiasts and rendering ninjas, but how many CI wizards are there? Not many², and so I found my role. I spent a lot of time improve the quality of the CI jobs and their associated ci tool.

What I'm proud of

Then again, I don't just hack around with YAML until the rectangle of lights acts to my liking. Of all the things I've done, I'm most proud of the following:

bevy-bencher

I wrote an automated system on Github Actions and https://bencher.dev that runs daily benchmarks on Bevy's main branch. It can catch performance regressions, file size changes, and more. In the coming months I hope to:

• Expand on the benchmarks themselves: we aren't tracking enough critical functions!
• Benchmark every commit, instead of just benchmarking daily.
• Introduce the iai-callgrind harness to track instruction count, not just wall time.³

flag-frenzy

flag-frenzy is a tool built to test combinations of Bevy's feature flags. Bevy has a lot of features, and it's really easy to write code that doesn't account for a specific combination. Though there are many popular tools that can test the combinatorial features explosions in Cargo projects, flag-frenzy stands out due to its:

• Memory efficiency: flag-frenzy lazily computes combinations instead of doing it all at once, avoiding large⁴ memory requirements!
• Expressive feature configuration: flag-frenzy lets you specify advanced feature requirements using an expressive TOML DSL.
• Work chunking: Inspired by cargo-all-features, flag-frenzy lets you split up work into chunks that you can distribute across multiple machines.
• Colorful output: flag-frenzy outputs parsable information using ANSI terminal colors, and it summarizes information in a failure report at the end of the program.

0.14 Migration Guide

I wrote the majority of the migration guide for 0.13 to 0.14. I edited 128 different entries over the course of 16 pull requests. It was a monumental effort that took over a month, but I am so happy with the final result.

I had a bit of burn-out after this (understandably so!), so I want to thank Trial for reviewing and merging follow-up changes to the guide after I took a break. I've since recovered, so if you find an issue with the guide then feel free to ping me on Github!

Contributor's Guide

I, along with Nth and a few others in the working group, have been writing and editing the (soon to be released) Contributor's Guide. Our hope is to consolidate development resources into a single source, improving the on-boarding experience for new contributors, and going into more depth than the existing resources.

At the time of writing, it's very close to being published! Alice has been taking the reigns in getting the final changes merged, so all that's left is copy-editing and cleanup.

I'm really proud of all the work I put into Bevy, even though it doesn't get much of the spotlight. The only time I got on the glorious release notes was to deprecate dynamic plugins, but I don't mind. There are plenty of talented and wonderful people who deserve recognition just as much as me!

A thank you letter

The Bevy community is truly a wonderful place to be. So many kind and welcoming people helped me, and I want to take some time to say thank you.

Alice

Alice, you are hands down the best maintainer I have ever worked with. You bring enthusiasm to your work every day and are a staple in the Bevy community. Whether it be a quick review, better wording in documentation, or even arcane Bevy lore, I know I can always reach out to you. Your merge train is a fun way to catch up with all the latest changes, and is something I look forward to each week.

Thank you for all that you do!

François

François, you don't get enough credit for the credit you deserve. Your infrastructure and behind-the-scenes work is inspirational, and is the reason you're the unofficial SME-CI. Pixel Eagle, the screenshot testing platform that you built from scratch, is incredibly useful. Not only does it catch bugs, but you also submit PRs that fix them too!

It's been a pleasure working alongside you.

Trial

Trial, you were one of the first people that I feel like I actually worked with on Bevy. I fondly remember us both working on the website over the span of 2 months, trading reviews and keeping the momentum going. Your expertise with Zola is unmatched, and you have a knowledge of the website's templates and macros that I envy.

Though you may not have realized how much it meant to me as a new contributor, thank you.

In the end, 3 thank-you's cannot describe how grateful I am to this community. It takes a true village to keep a project this scale running, so an additional thank you is required to Cart, Jan, IceSentry, Brezak, Jondolf, Talin, Chris, NiseVoid, Charlotte, pcwalton, MrGVSV, SkiFire, Jasmine, James, rparret, Aevyrie, Joy, Nth, and so many more! You all rock!

If you want to build something awesome with Rust or get into the game development scene, please consider contributing to Bevy! Check out the issue tracker, specifically issues labeled D-Trivial and D-Straightforward. They're how I and so many others got started, so I highly recommend it!

Bevy has been life-changing. I've met so many wonderful people, worked on so many fun things, and helped so many others to do the same. It's truly an era that I will look back on with joy and pride.

Chat with you on Discord,

~ BD103