Roughly 100 days ago, I joined Mend to work on the Renovate project as a maintainer and community manager. In a vague homage to the style of politics' "first hundred days", I'll talk about some things that have happened since I've joined the project, and some of the interesting (and mundane) things I've learned since joining the project.
This was originally going to be a talk presented at FOSDEM 2026, but there was a lot of strong competition to the half-day Package Management track so I didn't get through to speaking.
Instead of losing out on the opportunity to share this, I thought I'd write it up as a blog post instead, as well as it being quite a nice opportunity to reflect back on the last few months.
Note that this post is focussing on the Mend Renovate CLI, the Open Source project that is commonly referred to as Renovate, and I won't be going into anything internal to Mend.
What's Renovate?
First, before we dig into the learnings I've had, let's first explore what Renovate is. It's likely you have some inkling if you're reading this, but it's worth making sure you have the context before reading further.
There's a good primer on what Renovate is on a recent post of mine, but a good TL;DR is that Renovate is an Open Source project ( AGPL-3.0-only ) owned by Mend, which boasts the best support + extensibility in the ecosystem for dependency updates, and we had over 300 human contributors and 1599 releases last year alone.
Since starting the project in 2017, we've gone through a few versions of how we operate the project.
Right now, we have three classes of folks who interact with the project:
Maintainers: the team who have final say on the direction of the project and new features, and whom have merge rights Contributors: people who regularly contribute to Renovate's features, fix bugs, improve documentation and help answer user questions Users: the folks who use Renovate, or are responsible for their Renovate deployment. They may infrequently raise PRs for documentation of bug fixes
... continue reading