Loud thinking about learning, play and community, doused in open source.

Erlend S. Heggen

Jun 16, 2020

Open Source as a Force For Good

..and the open source nazi problem.

Erlend S. Heggen

Oct 28, 2019

Business makes better open source

Preamble: I worked at Discourse for 4 years, ultimately as VP of Community. I left amicably earlier…

Erlend S. Heggen

Jan 30, 2019

What you (don’t) get from an open source project

The Fair Share Clause

A thought experiment for sustainable open source.

Erlend S. Heggen

Oct 13, 2016

How (competitive) gaming helped me figure out what I’m good at

These days I spend maybe 1h/week leisurely playing games, if even that. That’s worryingly little! In my early teens I was spending about 30h/week on games. That was too much. Or was it?

Optimising for communication efficiency, to a fault

We recently had one of our customers and community members post the following:

The good thing i like here about the @team is how quick and responsive you guys are and the community to new ideas and suggestions. In…

A new approach to managing my personal projects (read: jMonkeyEngine)

I recently had a big change in my life (I’m the guy in the middle).

My first contributions to Discourse were purely out of love. A year in, I realised I could see myself doing this…

Erlend S. Heggen

Mar 30, 2015

Is high bandwidth required to read a Discourse forum?

I’ve been seeing a lot of FUD being spread recently when it comes to JavaScript-heavy applications that require a ~500kb script download (conservative estimate) to run the web app.

Erlend S. Heggen

Mar 8, 2015

Unity 5 is free — is jMonkeyEngine still relevant?

Erlend S. Heggen

Dec 7, 2014

WordPress as an application framework makes perfect sense

Writing this as a follow up to Jeff Chandler’s “What Would it Take For WordPress to Lose its Dominance?”, I started out with the title “Can WordPress be displaced?”, but as I wrote, I reached a conclusion that prompted the title…