I noticed that today happens to be the 6th anniversary of this blog post being posted to HN, reddit, etc (previous HN discussion at
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3606380). I think it's fair to say that that event marked a major turning point in the development of Julia, probably doubling or tripling the contributor base overnight, many of whom (myself included) are still actively involved in the community. It's a little funny to see the blog post talk about 1.0 (that release would eventually be called 0.1), since that's still not out 6 years later (though this time around it is actually soon to be released). The blog post says julia was 90% done at the time - I guess it's true what they say, 10% of the work takes 90% of the time.