18: Whys and hows of open sourcing, with Pete Hunt

Under utveckling

Recorded on-stage at Øredev 2017, Fredrik talks to Pete Hunt about open sourcing the code you work on, why and how you might do it. There are many reasons to release code, from recruitment to giving back to the community to improving code quality and processes. We also touch on good reasons for writing your own thing in the first place: Are you uniquely good at it, do you have a unique market insight or do you have a unique technical insight? Don't hurry, don't release something as open source as soon as the first version is finished.

How to think about maintaining an open source project if it does become popular? Think about how hard it's going to be, then double that. Staff appropriately, or scale it down to available staff. The message can't stand alone, it needs context. Make a pitch for it, including how to measure success, have a plan. Pitch both internally and externally.

To round things off, a bit about what's interesting right now, and how frontend and backend are approaching eachother.

Links

• TimeEdit - world-class scheduling and resource management (in our humble opinion)
• Pete Hunt
• React
• Smyte
• How to get people to use your open source project - Pete's first presentation at Øredev
• Fraud detection without labeled data - Pete's second presentation
• TAM - total addressable market
• Redis
• Cassandra
• Michael Stonebreaker
• Not invented here syndrome
• Salesforce
• Hacker news
• Reddit
• jsxstyle
• Smyte's open source projects
• Rocksdb
• Kafka
• Flux
• Kafka streams
• KSQL
• Kubernetes
• Elm
• Graphql
• Relay
• Apollo
• Graphcool

Under utveckling is a podcast by and for developers, created in sunny (cough) Gothenburg by us at TimeEdit. We would love your feedback on the topics we discuss! We are on Twitter as uupodden and at Facebook as Under utveckling. If you enjoy the podcast we'd love a rating and review in iTunes!