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!