Ovilia

Luck nudged me into the ECharts orbit nearly ten years ago as a fresh intern. Today I speak not just as a user, but as a ten-year contributor and someone who grew up alongside Apache ECharts. ECharts was first open-sourced on GitHub in 2013. What began as an internal charting library quietly slipped into the wild, polished by engineers who simply wanted better charts for everyone. By 2015 I was an intern on the team, fixing tiny bugs, then dreaming bigger. My first love letter to the project was the liquid-fill chart—water that rises like hope in a glass. In that moment I realized code can be poetry; data, story. In 2018 we ferried ECharts across an ocean and offered it to the Apache Software Foundation. Two years later it graduated. During incubation we learned that healthy software is not built by heroes but by habits—clear governance, welcoming docs, and the grace to let people leave and return without drama. Last month we shipped ECharts 6.0.0. Beneath the calm surface: a new default theme that feels confident, modern, and versatile. Responsive dark-mode that listens to your OS. Chord charts, swarm charts, jittering scatter charts, enhanced stock charts, broken axes, and a matrix coordinate system that lets any chart nest inside any other. We turned custom series into truly registerable components ready to reuse. Yet the code is only half the story. The heart of ECharts beats in its people: midnight reviewers, weekend contributors, students sending their first pull request and greeted like old friends. In every design debate we argue more about architecture than features, because—as my mentor once said—“adding a feature is the easiest part.” That sentence still walks beside me, reminding me that the kindest thing we can build is room for the next idea. If you need to turn numbers into meaning, come stand with us. The water is still rising, and there is always space for one more ripple.