Upgrading our Community Pull Requests Experience

The Airbyte community has been growing rapidly, with members creating pull requests faster than they can be reviewed and merged. This highlights the strength of the community and the simplicity of enhancing existing connectors or contributing new ones. However, there are some issues that need to be addressed in 2023, such as testing a PR requiring manual intervention, unclear requirements for publishing a new version of a connector, and tightly coupled complex connectors. To improve the situation, Airbyte will prioritize creating self-serve support tools, rethinking how secrets are shared and tests run for contributors, revamping their Connector Metadata system, adding CDKs (connector development kits) for file-based sources, and decoupling Java database connectors. In the short term, users should focus on enhancing existing popular connectors or creating new connectors using the low-code CDK.