Open source is everywhere. It’s in your phone and in your car. It’s flying satellites to orbit and helping cure diseases. It’s powering today’s economy. Latest survey finds it in 96% of code bases, in which it represents more than half of the lines of code.
And yet… whereas every…
Open source contribution policies fascinate me. They’re generally left to management or legal to figure out. Developers rarely know of them. And yet, they shape the way companies practice open source… and thus how they write software
I spoke about creating open source contribution policies that don’t suck at the…
The context: across its different working groups, W3C has over 150 invited experts that contribute to spec work in various capacities, sometimes doing a lot of the heavy lifting. …
The big picture: employers regularly seek to hire open source contributors, so much so that the word out on the street today is that if you’re a software engineer, your GitHub profile is your resumé (that’s a an issue in and of itself, but not the topic of this article)…
In a recent Huffington Post’s article about Ocasio-Cortez’s interrogation of Michael Cohen, the authors claimed that “[o]ne advantage Ocasio-Cortez has over some colleagues is that she consistently attends even the most mundane committee hearings, since she does not spend any of her day calling donors for money.”
That’s a second-order…
Last week, I posted about measuring the health of open source projects you want to take on as a dependency. A mailing list reader replied that they really like the simplicity of just focusing on the date of the last commit (shared with permission). …
Open source software doesn’t come with service level agreements. You can decide to rely an open source project today, only to see its core maintainers leave and its community dwindle within a year.
Sure, you’ll be able to continue using the software, but you’ll be the one responsible for keeping…
Unrolling this twitter thread.
We’re seeing the same thing today with CSS that we’ve seen seen with HTML/JS before and which led to the current JS framework situation:
📱 A competition with native for slick app-like user experiences.
🐘 Larger teams working on more complex apps with needs that aren’t…
Yesterday, Stratechery’s Ben Thompson wrote a thought provoking article about the current AWS / MongoDB kerfuffle that’s been keeping the open source community’s echo chamber humming for the past couple of weeks.
It’s refreshing to have an outsider’s perspective on the topic.
It’s a great piece and you should absolutely…
Open source is largely built on engineers’ free time. And free time isn’t evenly distributed. People who work two shifts, who care for elders and children—care-giving is still predominantly done by women—or with long commutes due to housing cost, just don’t have the time to contribute. The gender imbalance in…
