All throughout 2019, Brandon Bayer was wanting something like Ruby on Rails but for Javascript and React. If you search Twitter history, you'll see him tweeting about this every so often, saying things like "someone please make this so I don't have to." 😂
Finally in February 2020, Brandon had a phone call with a Ruby on Rails developer friend. This call sparked him to finally try making Rails for React. It seemed like good timing with all the new features in Next.js and Prisma 2 being released in beta.
One week later, Brandon officially announced Blitz on February 17, 2020.
At the time he only had a couple hundred lines of prototype code. But the idea resonated with so many people, that many jumped in and helped architect and build the very first alpha version.
In other words, Brandon essentially built the Blitz community before building the project.
This turned out to be a great decision. 38 amazing people contributed to the first alpha which was released on April 24, 2020.
The official beta version, 0.30.0, was released on the 1 year anniversary, February 17, 2021!
In March 2021, we made the decision to fork Next.js, with an expectation that Blitz would start to carve out a small portion of Next.js users. But that hasn't happened. In fact, we think the fork has hurt adoption and our growth has stagnated that year.
In December 2021, we proposed to pivot Blitz to a fullstack, framework-agnostic toolkit that preserves the world-class DX and features we adore but brings it to all Next.js users and optionally Remix, SvelteKit, Nuxt, etc. You can read the RFC here.
Soon after the pivot proposal, we started working on it, and released the first alpha version in May 2022. Brandon has announced it for the first time during React Miami conference. You can check out the recording here. Currently the core team is working towards the stable version of the Blitz.js Toolkit.