“Blog about what you’re doing”

People have been doing awesome work lately:

  • Cody Russell and Neil Patel have been rocking Unity.
  • Paul Hummer and Aaron Bentley have been doing amazing work fixing tons of bugs so that we can offer people an easy way to offer daily builds.
  • Happiness is seeing the LoCo council working with individual teams through reapproval and the level of detailed work going on there.

Three examples.

In the first I forget Ted Gould and the rest of that team. Daily builds wouldn’t be such an oft requested feature if it wasn’t for the great work Fabien Tassin has done in this area. And the last example involves so many people I don’t know where to begin. 

I’m going to make an effort to stop blogging about “what I am doing” and talk about the people who are enabling me to do stuff because I can’t catch them all, but if we think about our team members more we can collectively tell our story.

Lately I think we’ve gotten in a collective funk of “here’s what I think about this.” followed by “Oh yeah, well here’s what I think of that”, and “Allow me to retort!” and then getting stuck in a rabbit hole of distractions.

So screw that, let’s share some stories Like this. And this. And talk about the people that are inspiring you that enables us to deliver this stuff to people.

Puppet cost me my best friend…

My best friend moved to California this week to work for a large company who is deploying tons of Puppet. It’s a tremendous opportunity for him.

He was working on Puppet for a while at a place and I spent a relatively long time complaining to him that he should just get involved in the project instead of just keeping his home grown stuff around (since in the long run that’s also more work). Eventually he came around and his work was accepted upstream.

I imagine if a company is looking for expertise in a given field that having your name in the upstream change log might be a good qualification as to how well you know that part of the project. It’ll certainly at least get you in the interview door. I’m sure more experienced OSS developers see this all the time, but it’s nice to see someone local and unknown go and “make it” with a project they care about.

He didn’t re architect anything, or rewrite huge chunks of code, or show up and amaze upstream with his talents and amazing abilities. He just went in there and fixed what he needed it to do, got the work accepted by peers, and then went on his merrily way, oblivious that what he was doing would play a role in his future career.

This says something about how projects accept contributions and help them grow. I am willing to bet that larger open source projects have small contributors just happily sitting in their corner, sending in the occasional patch or test that you never hear about. Are we collectively working to keep the barrier low so that people can opportunistically contribute? Is our mentoring thorough enough that we can help our colleagues reach “the next level”?

It kind of puts the goals of Operation Cleansweep in perspective to me. On one hand you can say “ok so they’re cleaning up a patch backlog, whatever.” but I’d like to think of it as cleaning up a backlog of contributors that wanted to help and we just didn’t have the resources to see their contribution through to it’s conclusion.