On the first of April 2010, I released a joke microframework called denied which made fun of the fact that all microframeworks at the time decided to forgo with dependencies and bundle up everything they need in a single Python file. What I did was embed all of Jinja2 and Werkzeug in a base64 encoded zip file within the framework's only Python file. The response to it was interesting in a few ways because on the one hand quite a few people did not really understand that it was an April fools joke to begin with and on the other, there was a discussion where there were no microframeworks that actually did use dependencies and encouraged it.
One month later there was a new project by the name of "Flask" which actually gave this concept a real shot. It launched with the tagline "a microframework for Python based on Werkzeug, Jinja 2 and good intentions" and six years later it's the most starred Python framework on GitHub.
What's interesting about Flask is that its success just happened. There are no conferences about it, no society or foundation and still today much of it heavily depends on me directly. I'm not even sure why it became this successful but I attribute a lot of it to the fact that it's easy to get started and the full footprint of the framework is small enough that it becomes easy enough to understand.
So what's changing now? Today we launch the Pallets Projects. What is it? Primarily it's a GitHub organization which will be the home of Flask and all the associated projects. It will be a new home for those libraries and the first step to give the community more impact on the development of Flask and all libraries. In addition there will be a new release of Flask very soon after a thorough check that we do not break anything.
The people behind the Pallets Projects are me, Markus Unterwaditzer, David Lord and Adrian Mönnich with the organization being open for newcomers to help and drive the projects forward.
We will spend the next few weeks adding as much organizational information on the project's website to ensure that what often currently only exists in my head is brought down to text.
I'm amazed how many people use and love Flask and my libraries and I hope that this organization will be a good step towards making this scale past me. It's humbling how big all of this became.