The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - ANTHOLOGY — The Future of Open Source at OSCON 2017 (Interview)

Episode Date: July 28, 2017

This is an anthology episode from OSCON 2017 featuring awesome conversations with Kelsey Hightower (OSCON Co-Chair and Developer Advocate at Google Cloud Platform), Safia Abdalla (Open Source Developer and Creator of Zarf), and Mike McQuaid and Nadia Eghbal (GitHub Open Source Programs).

Bandwidth for Changelog is provided by Fastly. Learn more at fastly.com. And we're hosted on Linode servers. Head to linode.com slash changelog. This episode is brought to you by ElixirConf 2017, held September 5th through 8th in Bellevue, Washington, just across the lake from Seattle in the home of Microsoft, as well as Amazon. It's two days of training on September 5th and 6th

and two days of conference and community on September 7th and 8th. Get face-to-face time with core developers of Elixir, Phoenix, Ecto, Nerves, and more. Learn from over 40 speakers and keynotes about how top companies and developers are getting performance gains from Elixir and surpassing their competition. There is no better place to discuss, collaborate, and socialize with other Elixir professionals and enthusiasts and the elixir conf organizers have been generous enough to give us a 40 discount this is exclusive to us you can't get this anywhere else head to elixirconf.com to learn more and use our special url elixirconf.com changelog to get that 40 discount. And now onto the show. From ChangeLog Media, you're listening to the

ChangeLog, a podcast featuring the hackers, leaders, and innovators of open source. I'm Adam Stachowiak, editor-in-chief of ChangeLog. Today, we are featuring some awesome conversations Jared and I had at OzCon 2017. First up is Kelsey Hightower, OzCon co-chair and developer advocate at Google Cloud Platform. We talked about being a co-chair, why he does live demos, and his motivations towards open source. Second, we talked with Safia Abdallah, open source developer and creative zarf, about being a command line junkie, and her talk on the intersection of open source developer and creative zarf about being a command line junkie and her talk on the intersection of open source and business. Last, we talked with Mike McQuaid and Nadia Ekbal about GitHub's open source alley, which can only be seen at OSCON and how they're working to better

support open source maintainers in their communities. So we're here with Kelsey Hightower, OSCON co-chair. What's itower, OzCon co-chair. What's it mean to be a co-chair? Co-chair, the job is to make sure that the program is worth buying a ticket for. Worth buying a ticket. So what do you do to achieve that? So we think about the themes. So like you saw the keynotes today, you know, we talk about some of the veterans in open source,

you know, people that have worked on projects like Apache all the way to the White House. What is our government doing with open source? So our goal is to think about the keynotes, the structure of the keynotes, and then also all the tracks. We know ML is pretty hot, so we have a TensorFlow day. We know containers are hot, so we have a container day. And then we try to make sure the workshops

actually deliver the skills people are looking for. You don't just go to a conference just to hang out. Some people come here to actually learn something. So as a program chair, you're kind of in charge of the program, and we make sure we also give people a chance to speak. So if you're a new speaker, we do the research to say, hey, this person's contributing to this project, and no one knows their name, but it doesn't mean they don't get to speak.

So we try to pull people up and make sure that the voices of the community are being heard. That's the role of a program chair. So we're here on, well, for us it's day one sure that the voices of the community are being heard. That's the role of a program chair. So we're here on, well, for us it's day one, but day three of the conference. First day of sessions. Is your job done at this point? Pressure's off?

You're just enjoying the show? Or you still got a lot of balls in the air? Well, for me, it's like going around and seeing all the sponsors, seeing people like the changelogs show up, and make sure the community is right. So I kind of focus on all parts of the community, right? There's the business business side of the community there's the people that are here for the very first time other people here on diversity scholarships there are people that are thinking about open source and this is like their first introduction to open source so as a chair you know I was also a speaker by giving two workshops on the first two

days so that hats off And now it's all about introducing our keynote speakers, making sure that they feel special. We give them a warm introduction and then walking around the floor. How's the conference going for you? Is it good? Shaking hands. And then sometimes people come to see you. Like maybe you had an open source project that you released and this is the first time they get to see you in person. And then you can actually make time for them one-on-one to go deeper in that conversation. And then I'm also learning, too. So I go and say, hey, what are you working on?

And I just listen for a minute. Give us an example of something you heard, some feedback you heard from the community about the conference. What's something you heard today? I think a lot of people were interested that our government is now actually embracing and shipping things. A lot of people think open source is just a grassroots thing that you do if you're hardcore, and then everyone else in the world ignores it. The scope of it has just grown big time.

And for some people, having a person in a tailor-made suit on stage articulating in very great detail about what they're doing at the White House and being able to give us a URL to go touch the code. Whether you're a startup or a big company, that's always been the challenge. Do you actually ship? And now here we are, the White House is shipping internal projects. And I think a lot of people are like, oh, if they can do it. Right. This is the king of bureaucracy, right? I mean, government is actually shipping software. So there's some of that. And then you also got some new projects, right? Like a lot of projects that

had a lot of hype, this container stuff. now people have had an opportunity to test it out you hear some horror stories yeah and we went that route is that right we watched your video and didn't quite work out that way and that's good feedback right it helps you understand that we're past the hype stage we got to be responsible so in my workshops i responsible. I gave people a taste and then made them go hands on. So they understood the pain like this ain't for everybody. So what you're going to do is you're going to do something from scratch and you're going to struggle. And I'm going to help you a little bit, but you're going to struggle first. So that way, when you go back to the office, you're not going to just be drinking the Kool-Aid. You're going to understand what you're talking

about. Because you're stating words you heard, basically. Exactly. People come to learn. You know, we don't need to just talk to them all the time. These are very smart people in attendance. We just got to give them an opportunity to understand what they're getting into. How long have you been involved in this conference in particular? So OSCON, my first OSCON

was probably about five or six years ago when it was in Portland. Right. And I remember walking in there like, wow, this is a big conference, right? A lot of big people there. You meet all these interesting people and it felt different from any other conference where it's more about a product

or a particular technology i think of oscon as like the github of conferences all the projects are here yeah right not a lot of people trying to sell anything it's like people are trying to prove their value in their contributions here if you want to show value you got to have contributions to talk about. And from there, just doing work in the community, I was invited to be a co-chair, which was an honor of itself. I've spoken at OSCON. I've given tutorials before. But I think it's opportunity to be a chair to shape it for everyone else, for the same person that will have the same experience that I had six years ago. So having this history with it, those who were not here today, listening to the show later on, what are they missing out on?

What's a common misconception about this conference that someone's like, I'm not going to fork over. I don't know what the ticket is. It's above $1,000. So it's harder for individuals to afford it. It's easier for companies to sponsor it. So what's that misconception? What's the hurdle for people that aren't here? Why aren't they here?

What are they missing out on? So the first thing, we have like 40% discounts for independent people. If you're not at a company, you're going to knock 40% off that price. And you can show up. So a lot of people do take that route. So we do stuff for the indie people. We get to give away a hall pass for free. We get some hall passes.

And we have diversity scholarships. So we have different ways for people to get in. So if you're a big enterprise, then you probably have the budget to send 10 people at the full price right but for independent people consultants where it costs it's harder to be here there are just discounts that are standard on the website so we always try to communicate those and then a lot of people are intimidated like i haven't contributed to open source for before do i deserve to be there right do i belong do i belong and truth is, most people is where they come and do their first contribution.

So we kind of have this kind of getting started segment of the show where you come out and you actually get to do your first commit or you learn how to do Git for the first time. How do I check out some code? How do I set up my editor? So there's a lot of tutorials that are geared towards that. Some of the things like the Open Container Day

where people come and contribute, we have a thing called Open Contribute as well. You can get in that with a towards that. Some of the things like the Open Container Day where people come and contribute, we have a thing called Open Contribute as well. You can get in that with a hall pass. So you just get the smaller tier thing, hall pass, you walk around, you get all the events. So after parties, you get to go to all the Container Day, TensorFlow Day, and learn from all the people that are core contributors to these projects.

So I think it's worth for people to come in and get that experience and then decide if you want to go a little deeper in the next year. Change the subject a little bit, Anya. A recent tweet, I think you even have it pinned at this point, I don't write code for free, I write code for freedom. So for people that are in hip-hop, they know Chance the Rapper has a line in one of his songs that he talks about about how he makes music,

and he does it for freedom. So Chance is known for not ever releasing an album that was for sale. It was streaming only and given away for free on the internet, and he won a Grammy. So he really broke the barrier. A lot of artists have released digital stuff before, digital album, but that's really just changing the format. Chance the Rapper has this huge heart where he really cares about people having access to his music, quality music.

That album is legendary in the hip-hop community already. So listening to that song, I just tweeted, I don't write code for free, I write code for freedom. And just my personal background, when I decided to write code myself, I threw it on GitHub on purpose because I want other people to get a use for it. So it's not like I'm trying to build a company out of it.

I'm not necessarily having a business model that I choose to go out of it. It's really my freedom to express myself. The fact that I learned how to program means that I'm free to build my own tools. And it's also to inspire other people. It's like, look, you actually have the power to do this. Most programming languages that I know of are free.

You download it. You can even run it on the most underpowered machine, even on your mobile device. And you can write any code you want. Honestly, that's freedom to me. It's not about people giving you money or whatever. They're freedom to express yourself. And then we have all these outlets, GitHub, ChangeLog, where you can go and talk about your projects. There's no other industry where you can actually express yourself at such a low cost. That's true. Yeah.

The barrier is very, very low to get in. But sometimes you need that invitation, you know? And that's what this is about. Like you were saying at this conference, like for those not coming here, they're either intimidated, they don't feel welcome, they don't feel invited, or that they belong here, you know? And I think for us to have a little bit of a following, a little bit of a platform, we've got to remind the people watching

that we also believe in what they believe in. Because people are not really sure what's going on in certain people's minds. It's like, is Google paying him to do everything he does? Does CoreOS influence everything he thinks about? And the truth is, I'm an independent thinker just like everyone else. And I try to navigate to organizations that support that.

So I think it's our responsibility to continually remind people I do this because of X, Y, Z. And no matter where I'm at, it's going to be the same output. And when it's not, you've got to call me on it. You've got to call me on it. How do you personally navigate that besides the communication side? Well, when people call you out on it, I just listen to be honest. I have interactions on Twitter where I'll just listen to be honest. Like, I have interactions on Twitter. Well, I'll just listen to people and really ask them, you know, hey, thanks for that feedback.

Could you elaborate a little bit more so I can make sure that I got it straight? And maybe they don't agree with something, and it's good for me to kind of hear that feedback. It's like, hey, Kelsey, maybe you give too many technical talks. Maybe you give talks about it seems like the happy path. Show me something a little deeper. So you look at that and say, first of all, they took the time to watch all the way through. That's like, dude, they gave me some of their time. I owe them a little bit of mine. The most expensive commodity. Exactly. Money, sure, you can earn more. Time, you can't get more of. So I try to follow in my actions. So recently I was here in Austin, gave a keynote kind of about my personal life. And let's just say there was a lot of people crying,

myself included, on stage because some of those words I've never said out loud before. And it wasn't a sad story. It was just a very real story. And to me, that is meeting the expectations of the community, taking all feedback from years and years and years of doing this stuff, and then one day being able to be on stage and give it right back to people, that's what happens when you listen. What is this keynote you were speaking of? DevOps Days Austin. I gave this keynote.

It's untitled. Is it on the internet? It's on the internet. A lot of people have watched it on YouTube. You can go to YouTube, DevOps Days Austin, and you can probably just search for Kelsey Hightower Keno. How long does it talk? About 20 minutes. Okay.

Right? And it's just like this American lifestyle of me navigating from my very first job at McDonald's to my introduction to tech and just my experiences along the way with the final summarization that regardless of the buzzwords, DevOps, Agile, Golang, Kubernetes, none of that matter. At the end of the day, it's you. And most people are very afraid to just embrace their own power. You have influence over what you do, who you work with, how you work.

And that was my first time being able to tell that story. It wasn't just about technology or tools. It was literally about my personal life and the people that I'm thankful for that helped me get there. And it's okay to say that out loud right without any approval without any data to back it up or that other people should do it too you just express yourself in the most natural way possible I think far too often see what am I trying to say here really you had a couple tweets recently they got a little bit of controversy because of your switch from one talk style to another so that's one thing but i think far too often we're not human enough in what we do

and it's it's not so much just focused on the technical or the culture kind of thing which is what that scenario was about and we'll maybe link these up uh those tweets up just to kind of give some people context but you know far too often we kind of get stuck in this situation where we're just trying to be you know smart, smart, so to speak. You know, I know Kubernetes or I know containers or I know this or that. You know, instead of just being you and being human and showing your flaws even, you know. And that's the imposter syndrome that comes up. It's the lack of invitation.

It's the lack of belonging. It's all those things that kind of come up and it just takes to being a human. People always ask me, why do I do live demos? And it's only because I want to show you the realness. I can't, on the slides, I can make you believe

anything with a slide deck. True, that's true. But with the live demos, I have to do it on stage live. I can't exaggerate it. So if I put it into a live demo,

it's me being human saying, I may or may not get this right right now. Yeah. While building a live demo, you have to have empathy on what's real. Right. I can't just be like pie in the sky stuff.

What do people actually want to see? So I think a lot of people don't understand that part. It's like, that's why I do the live demo. It's a little bit more challenging. It's a little bit more risky. But the goal is to really put myself in everyone else's shoes and go that route. That live demo route, though, I've seen a couple of yours, and a couple have gone bumpy. You had a couple of bumps. That's good, though, I've seen a couple of yours and they've couple have gone bumpy. You had a couple bumps. That's good though because you get

to see those bumps. It's like even Kelsey, even Kelsey can mess up you know. Have you ever had one that just completely exploded on you? No I did and I think that's when I started to do them more. I got a little bit more more confidence. Yeah. I was at the one of the very first Kubernetes ones where we had like getting around 1.0 launch and we were all in San Francisco. And this is when I was at one of the very first Kubernetes ones when we were getting around 1.0 launch, and we were all in San Francisco. And this is when I was still at CoreOS, and I met kind of the core engineering team. We were all there for Kubernetes Summit.

And I was doing this smooth demo. I mean, it was smooth. And I used to do it on my laptop. And then the networking switch and all the VMs crashed. And I'm almost out of time. And I was like, anyone want to see me finish this? And they were like, yeah, because everyone was on the edge of the seat

to see how this thing goes down. So I deleted the whole cluster and I built it back from scratch. Walked it back up and we got the whole thing done. And it was like mic drop. And someone came up to me afterwards like, you did that on purpose. You're trying to show off.

I was like, man, I'm sweating bricks, dude. Like that, that was so dope. And then that told me that it's okay to mess up. What people come to see is you make it through it. And that's what gave me the confidence that if that's the worst, then I'm good from here. Yeah, man. That's cool. I've seen live demos explode on people at talks.

And, of course, you have the empathy. You feel bad for them. But then you also enjoy how they deal with it. Pull through, man. And then cheering them. Because no one's in the audience haha we knew you were gonna mess up this live demo you know we're here we caught you everyone's there cheering on the person i mean you said something really important there

we caught you yeah like people are there usually to support the speaker yeah and when people hit a rough spot or they get emotional or they get scared or nervous you can look in people's eyes and you just see this they're like like, I'm right here for you. I'm not checking my email right now. Like, you good. Just come on. I'll be quiet while you get through this. And I think a lot of people forget that.

That's the interaction we have. Yeah. That's a good point because I think far too often when you're on the stage and you're in that spotlight, it's really easy to get totally full of fear. You know, like, you're just like, I'm on the spotlight. Everybody out there thinks I'm an idiot. I can't get this right. How did I get myself in this situation? Can I get out fast? And the only thing I think maybe what you learned with your live demos was like power through, you know, and, and there's some, there's something you gain

once you do power through, cause you kind of gain that confidence. Like, okay, it's not that hard. Or, you know, I, I dealt with that pressure, so with that pressure so to speak you know and uh you made it on the other end that's the hardest part making it through yep and i'm glad and i think the community has been very supportive of me personally i think a lot of people don't realize what it takes for someone to be successful it takes a whole bunch of people pushing you up and celebrating when you win. And when I see people, they may ask for a selfie. Give me a good example of celebrating a win. So here's the thing, you go out and now my Kubernetes book is almost finished with

the help of some co-authors came in, Joe Beta, Brendan Burns, co-founders of Kubernetes, and them celebrating like, hey, this dude started a book and we're going to help him finish it. Or when you show up at a conference and people ask you to sign the book for them. Or when you release something on GitHub. I have this documentation of Kubernetes the hard way. I really wanted everyone to be able to experience Kubernetes the hardest way possible so they learn all the moving pieces. So that way they can also walk around with that level of knowledge.

And when people hit that star button and then you watch that thing climb, that's people celebrating with you or you tweet an update on Twitter and everyone retweets. Brian Kettleston, right? Host of Go Time. Yeah. And I remember my birthday came out and he was like,

I want everyone to retweet if Kelsey taught you something. And when you wake up to that and you see that number as high as it got, you're like, wow. What's this story? This was recently. This was like on my birthday someone went out of their way. This was recently. This was on my birthday, February 27th.

Okay. Brian Kelson, he's in a different time zone. He's three hours ahead of me, so I'm still asleep. In Florida. In Florida. I'm in Portland. And he kicks off this thread on Twitter. It's like, hey, it's Kelsey Hightower's birthday today.

I would like you to retweet if you learned or Kelsey has taught you something. And you wake up and you see that, like, your phone's buzzing, like, what the hell's going on? I haven't done anything today. And then you see that. That's celebrating your win when people say nice things about you and you're not even there. And it's positive energy.

This isn't, like, negative energy where you're attacking or being attacked. This is just straight up positive energy. And to me, I think that's part of it. And when you're energy where you're attacking or being attacked. This is just straight up positive energy. And to me, I think that's part of it. And when you're saying that you're successful, I guarantee if you look around, it's because someone is celebrating your victories. And that's why it proliferates the way it does. That's awesome. I love that story, man.

That's awesome. I would love to have a birthday like that one day. Now you're just teasing. Now you're just setting it up. Note to self. Thanks, Kelsey. It's a pleasure, man. Awesome. Thanks for having me. Coming up after the break, we talk with Safia Abdallah about being a command line junkie

and her talk on the intersection of business and open source and how open source can operate more like a business. We also talk about the ever-growing number of hats and skills required of open source maintainers. All this and more after the break. This episode is sponsored by CircleCI. Thank you. They recently launched version 2.0 of their platform with a focus on providing faster build times thanks to advanced caching strategies and flexible resource allocation. Super fast build cycles ensure quality code by using SSH access and local builds to quickly troubleshoot and remediate.

Flexibility to run CI and CD without limits. There's no pausing work while environments update and language inclusivity frees up your team to use any tool chain or framework because CircleCI supports every language that runs on Linux. And finally, control workflows, let your team run, build, test, deploy stages as individual jobs, which lets you fully customize your development process. There's a ton more to learn about CircleCI, so head to circleci.com slash changelawpodcast. Once again, circleci.com slash changelawpodcast to learn about CircleCI, head to CircleCI.com slash ChangeLawPodcast. Once again, CircleCI.com slash ChangeLawPodcast to learn more. Safia, like Mafia, Abdallah. Yes. Love it.

What did she release recently? Was it nightly or was it weekly? What was it? She's been all over everything. All over everything. I got a couple of, pulled up a couple of them that I remember off the top of my head.

You want me to tell you them or you want me to surprise you guys? Surprise me. She knows what they are. She knows what they are. If I can remember them all, to be honest, I forget some of them sometimes.

Unforgettable. Would you say that prolific and open source describes you? Prolific is such a, I don't think so. I'm not sure what the metric for prolific is. I've only been an open source for about two years, but I have produced a lot of work in that time, technical, community, documentation, and otherwise. So, according to Webster, prolific means,

it's got two good versions of this adjective, producing much fruit or foliage or many offspring, or also present in large numbers or quantities, plentiful. I guess recently I've been prolific because I have been producing a lot of work. Do you consider your open source projects offspring? Yeah. You do? A little bit.

Like babies. Then you're prolific. There are babies that I tend to. There you go. Yeah. A little garden. Sometimes badly, but they are my children. I like that. They are my children. I don't always take the care of them, but they are my children. I like that.

They are my children. I don't always take the care of them, but they are my children. So, Safia Abdallah, you've been releasing so many things lately. I was just telling you before we started recording that I'm starting to feel inadequate as an open source programmer. It's like, how is anybody going to keep up with this lady? A few things that have hit weekly, Phony, which tell us about Phony real quick. So Phony is a command line tool that basically allows you to generate test JSON data from

a defined schema. So if you wanted to create a list of 10 JSON objects that contained a name and an address. You could do that at the command line really quickly. Exactly. And then Legit or Legit, I don't know how you say it. Yeah, so Legit was one of the first projects I produced. It's kind of similar to a lot of other projects that exist in the ecosystem with a fun twist. Legit allows you to add a license to your open source project, but it

actually allows you to also add license headers to specific files, which is a requirement by some licenses that sometimes people don't necessarily follow. So that was legit. There was a couple of stuff more recently. I've released Giddy, which is a command line wrapper around Git, and it attempts to address some of the user experience hiccups with Git. So revision history traversal at the command line with Git is not super fun. So Giddy abstracts that logic out and provides you two simple commands

to do revision history traversal. And it's also got a Giddy oops functionality, which basically allows you to fix common git issues, like, oh, I made a commit, but I forgot to add this file. Or, oh, I want to undo this commit that I just did. So yeah. MARK MANDELBAUM- A lot of command line tools. KATE MOOREY HANSON- Yes.

MARK MANDELBAUM- Are you a command line junkie, or what's the deal? KATE MOOREY HANSON- I am. So I think one thing that I get asked a lot about the stuff I make is, why are you making this? That's a nice question. Why does this have to exist? And the reason is that I work a lot at the command line.

Most of the work I do is in Hyper, which is a terminal built in Electron using React and JavaScript. It's really amazing and interesting technology. I usually have one pane that is Vim, and then two panes that are just shells for me to, like, run tests on or run a server or just, like, execute Git commands. So I'm in the command line a lot, and I kind of preach this philosophy of minimalism in my development environment.

So I don't add a ton of extensions and tools philosophy of minimalism in my development environment. So I don't add a ton of extensions and tools and like crazy things, customizations, until I know I need them. Because I think one thing that kind of happens a lot in tech is we take more than what we need and the philosophy that I've adopted is start with the most basic setup you can, and then as you encounter a problem or a pain point, find the resolution instead of finding a solution for a problem that you might not have or might not exist for you yet.

Yeah. And so a lot of the tools I've built have come up because I was working on a project and I was like, I wish there was this thing, but it has to work this very specific way that I want because I'm a very anal person. And that thing didn't exist, so I set out and made it, and then I just released it in the open because I guess that's what you should do when you make things,

or at least that's what I do as someone who works in an open source. That's kind of where they all started. So you're also an organizer of PyData Chicago. Yes. So you do some Python, you do some JavaScript, all these tools that are like MPM installable things. Yeah. Tell us about your efforts in organizing and what you're up to there.

So PyData Chicago is a community meetup. We meet once a month and the idea is to bring people who are doing interesting work around open science and open source, specifically as it relates to data science. In a previous life, I was really interested in data science, but then I kind of made the transition into web technologies.

So no more interest? Very little interest? Less interest. Some interest, no active work is the best way to put it. Some interest, no active work, meaning you couldn't find work or you don't have currently work. Not currently having work. Because the interest in data science is now less than the interest in web technologies. Meaning other people's interest or your interest.

Other people's interest. Like I'm interested in observing where the industry is going, what people are doing, keeping track of it, connecting people together. And moving yourself to be there. Yeah. Just kind of watching the room. Yeah. But maybe not necessarily being a part of the show.

Oh, you're part of the show. Always part of the show. Always part of the show. The JavaScript show. I mean, if you're on the JavaScript show, I mean, if you're on the JavaScript show, if you're a command line junkie or in the JavaScript or NPM communities and you're on Twitter, you've seen Captain Sophia retweeted around

with some new awesome UCLI tool. I've seen it so many times recently that I told you I'm getting a fear of inadequacy. And so you're part of the show. I mean, maybe you even are the show at this point. Just don't undersell yourself. part of the show. I mean, maybe you even are the show at this point. Oh, boy. So just don't undersell yourself. Captain of the show.

Captain of the show. Adam knows what he's talking about. But we cut you off when you're talking about PyData Chicago, so I apologize. Oh, yeah, no. So we meet once a month. Generally, people talk about work that they're doing that's related to machine learning, deep learning, really interesting stuff going on in the field that's also happening out in open source. Because one of the big things about data science is although it can be used to push a company's bottom line forward and help them make more money because they understand their customers' habits better, it's also something

that should be done in a public space. People should know what technology companies are using to process their data and have insights and awareness into how that works. My effort with PI Data Chicago is just bring more transparency into the field of data science. You've been watching the show. You're at the show. We're at OSCON. Yeah. First, curious what you're. We're at OSCON. Yeah. First, curious what you're up to here at OSCON, what you're talking about,

and then we'll talk to you about where you see things moving next. But what are you seeing here at OSCON today? Oh, so confession, this might not be super good material for the podcast. I flew in yesterday or Tuesday evening, spent most of Wednesday prepping for my talk, which I had to give Wednesday afternoon. And then after I gave my talk, I just kind of like shut down. So I didn't get to see. For good reason. Yeah. Crunch time, right?

Oh, my goodness. Yeah. You just got to decompress. Press her off. Do not prep a talk five hours before you're due to present it. That's like an intense and stressful experience. How did it go? I think it went pretty well. The talk covered kind of the intersection of open source and

business and what tech companies can do to be more like open source projects and what open source projects can do to be more like tech companies. So kind of that relationship between the two. I did get a chance to talk to a ton of people. This is my first O'Reilly conference, actually. So the vibe is different from the kind of local or community conferences that I usually go to. How do you mean vibe? So it's bigger. The space is bigger. There's more people. I generally either will go to a conference that's focused on a particular topic, so either a JavaScript conference or a Python conference or a data

science conference. There's a lot of diversity in topic material here, which is good because you get to kind of see more things and it encourages you to discover new things that you might not generally be interested in. But it can also be overwhelming because there's just like so much going on. There's a lot going on. Yeah. And I'm definitely kind of a one track kind of person. Okay. Yeah.

I also enjoy a small one track conference. In fact, I help organize a small one track conference about JavaScript, a regional one. Plug it. NEJS Conf. NEJS Conf. July 21st. Be there or be square. Or be around Circle. Whatever it takes, come there.

Please come. Please come. JS for the win. So tell us a little bit more about your talk. You said it's the intersection of business and open source. I like how you said not just how businesses can be more like open source, because that seems like a lot of people are talking about that, but also how open source can be more like business. That seems like not too many folks are thinking about that. Yeah. So the premise I started off in my talk was the fact

that a lot of open source projects, at least the ones that are really notorious, well-known and well-utilized in the industry, in production, and inside projects, and pretty much everywhere, are the ones where the maintainers or contributors have put in a lot of time into developing the technical code base, the documentation. They've put in a lot of work in developer evangelism and the marketing and branding. And they've also, to a certain extent, done some work around fundraising and sustainability plans for their open-source project and the premise I laid out was all of these things are

things that a tech startup would do like think of any successful tech startup and it's likely that they're executing all five of those things but open source maintainers and contributors who own or build large successful projects don't get the same amount of noise or attention that tech CEOs do. Because there just isn't that like allure and that curiosity associated with open source. And so the premise I laid out was that every open source project that operates as a certain scale is actually a mini business and maintainers are actually entrepreneurs who have the potential to go off and start

tech companies in the usual lens that we think of them. And I talked a little bit about what that means for us to exist in a society that glorifies and values the Mark Zuckerbergs, but doesn't glorify and value the people who made it possible for Mark Zuckerberg to build Facebook in his dorm room over the course of a couple of days or weeks. All free open source software.

We've had this conversation to some degree with James Pierce, head of open source at Facebook, and he basically said in that show that because of open source and the roots of Facebook is built on open source, it even came to be and it's even possible. Yeah, but go into any American household and ask them to explain what open source is or what its role is in the phone that they own or the TV that they own or the laptop that they use, and they're not going to be able to explain what open source is or what its role is in the phone that they own

or the tv that they own or the laptop that they use and they're not going to be able to explain it or you go to the about page of any app you use and it's like they give the disclosure like these are the open source yeah projects we use and it's like well instagram and everything they are is front and center but sure they okay in the about section or this very low menu that is obscure and never found there they mentioned the open source i use. Is that what you mean by that? Yes, exactly. And I think the first reaction that people have is, well, is it really necessary for the day-to-day consumer of our products

to know that we're using open source or what open source is? So what? Whatever. I think it is necessary. I think it's an important part of having transparency between you and your users. And just, like like people should know that the software they use is not software that's entirely produced by a certain company. Like the risk you take by introducing open source into your organization is you have a code base that is outside of your control. And your consumers should know that, that it's both a good thing and

a bad thing, but your consumer should be aware of where the software that they're using is coming from. If we all want to know what's in our package of chips or our steak, we should know what's in our software. It's a good comparison to the nutrition facts. This is what's in your food. Do not eat it or do not eat it you know how many npm modules are in this stuff i'm not using that that's a good one man that's a good one and

i think as we as technology becomes more pervasive in our society and data becomes more pervasive in our society people are going to want to know how their software works and who they're trusting their information with some people will for. Down to the open source level. Yeah. And certainly not every Joe and Jane in the world is going to want to know what open source project is used in my software, but it's information that should be easily accessible and consumable to the general non-technical public.

So what's a great way to deploy that kind of mindset? So maybe let's use one example. Since I know for sure Instagram lists in their submenus, this is the open source we use, how could Instagram change to reflect a world where you're sharing? I think bringing it in and moving it to the updates text in app updates, that's the one place that consumers generally are more likely to read information than kind of like scrolling through, yeah, scrolling through like settings in their app is a bit more hidden

is a good place to add it. In the install screen, if that's something where the software would make sense to have that kind of information displayed in the install screen, but I think move it away from like hidden behind settings and like various toggles and menus and just put it front and center where the user can access it if they know that that's what they want to read I was surprised they did it at all yeah I was too when I saw that I was

yeah they have to disclose because of licensing but doesn't mean they have to follow it. They can break the law. Well, I mean, that's true. Anybody can break the law. I'm just saying, I'm just surprised they would even surface it at all. Yeah, but certainly if the licenses did not require it, they probably would not have done it at all. So, say, like, if you enforce it at the license level,

like, you can use the software, but you have to display it. A lot of them are like, you have to include this in the, you know, reproduced copy or whatever. But if it actually said, like, and you have to display it prominently during your launch screen or something, that would be an actual license that you would insist upon. And maybe that would be what you would use it. The UX would be like, nope, sorry. Yeah.

Don't want to compromise our brand. That's interesting, though, to glorify the Mark Zuckerbergs, but not the open source tools out there that enable Mark to be Mark. Well, not Mark to be Mark, but Mark to be Mark of Facebook, for example. Marky Mark. Glorify that. And I think in a certain way, when we present the people behind the big tech companies that

we see, like the people who are developing the open source software, that's a much more approachable image to attain for than being like a tech CEO or this like insane genius in their dorm room. Like if you told somebody a lot of the software that you use is actually lots of small tools built by lots of different people across the world, that's a more empowering and relatable message than Mark Zuckerberg did this thing in his dorm room in two weeks because he was a genius. So there's also that kind of social and technical education perspective to it too. I think your point about most, you said open source maintainers are like entrepreneurs.

It definitely resonates with me because a lot of the conversations that we have and we speak with businesses, we also speak with open source developers, and we bring, I mean, we are a business. We're also open source developers. So we bring kind of a product and a business. I feel like I'm asking business questions to open source maintainers all the time. If you just replace that person with somebody running a startup, I would be asking that person the exact same.

I mean, we talk about traction, sustainability. We talk about... sustainability we talk about the currency is different as well a business or the end goal generates money dollars whereas an open source project is more like users maintainers contributors you know the the users are your currency well you know there's value is what i'm trying to say there's some value being exchanged absolutely and there's some sort of form of, whether it's like the old school woofy or it's actual dollars, you know? What'd you say?

The old school woofy? Woofy. Look it up. You lost me at woofy. Keep going with the conversation. I'll find it real quick for you. Okay. So on the other side, well, not on the other side, but another point to that is a lot of

the, so what we see is a lot of open source projects thriving and dying, right? We track that. We pay attention to it. We talk to the people that are thriving. Sometimes we talk to the ones that are not doing so well. But we do retrospectives about projects, and a lot of the times the things that hinge on success or failure are the same things that would a business. So I think that's an apt comparison. And so the ones also, of course, just like in business, there's luck and timing and there's

things outside of your control. But a lot of the people that we see having success in open source is because they are thinking about it in the same way that an entrepreneur would. So they're very deliberate about their actions and they're not just floating some software out there. One thing that I like to say is if you want to have a successful open source project, would. They're very deliberate about their actions and they're not just floating some software out there. One thing that I like to say is if you want to have a successful open source project, you have to have a lot of hustle. It's that same... Can't that be what? A lot of hustle. A lot of hustle. It's that same attribute that we associate with entrepreneurs in the traditional

sense. Definitely. Yeah, you definitely do. Yeah, you definitely can't fit what I think is maybe the traditional image of an open source developer, which is someone who's purely technical and very skilled in a small subsection or stack. To really be successful, you have to be the person who can, like I mentioned earlier, go out and do the documentation, go out and do the marketing and branding, be a developer evangelist, all of that. Many hats, lots of skills. Yeah. So you've had a lot of success lately, at least in terms of people using your stuff, liking your stuff.

What's next for you in the open source world? I think I'll probably keep doing a lot of those small little CLI tools. Because really what I'm doing there is scratching my own itch and I share it with the world. And sometimes it picks up up sometimes it doesn't I've had a few things that weren't super exciting and didn't really pick up but they're useful to me and that's all that matters so I'll probably keep developing that I'm probably going to stay in the JavaScript ecosystem for a long while I've started to explore going into Rust and Go, but JavaScript has my heart. Nice. It appears.

So I guess next six months for me, I'll probably be doing a lot of open source CLI tools. So keep your eyes on your Twitter feed for what I'm going to drop. Yes. I love that. And to close the loop on Woofy, since I can't leave this, the audience is sitting there saying, like, Adam's looking it up. He's going to tell us what it is. I had already forgotten about it. I had originally heard of Woofie from Tara Hunt's book called The Woofie Factor.

As per Wikipedia, it's described as, Woofie is the ephemeral reputation-based currency of Cory Doctorow's science fiction novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. So, Wolfie is essentially a reputation factor currency. Like clout. So, that's what I meant. Yeah, it's clout. Yeah. That's why I said back the old school Wolfie because... Right.

Leave it to Cory Doctorow. To use it in a book. Yeah, exactly. And Tar Hunt to write the book on it, basically. But it's, you know, you do good things out there, you get reputation, that's a form of currency is what I mean by that. So in business and open source,

there's still some sort of currency happening. It's just described, it's in different forms. Exactly. Woofie. Woofie. Learn something new every day. Bring it back, Woofie. Safia, final thoughts about Woofie

and specifically, no, anything else you'd like to close on or talk about? No, not now. Okay,

keep your eye on the Twitter feed for what she's about to drop. What's the Twitter handle again? Captain Safia. Trekkie.

Check the show notes. It'll be there. Thank you so much. No problem. After the break, we close down this show and OzCon by talking with Nadia Ekbal and Mike McQuaid from GitHub about GitHub's open source alley. This is something they only do at OzCon, and its aim is to feature open source maintainers in their projects. There's conversation, live demonstration, and GitHub does this completely free of any cost to maintainers. In fact, they help them with branded giveaways like stickers, t-shirts, and more.

We also get a glimpse at a different side of GitHub. The side that Nadia and Mike work on that has a mission of better supporting open source maintainers, their communities, and communicating their roadmap to open source developers. Stick around. Thank you. plus APM for monitoring your application's performance, dashboarding, collaboration tools, and alerts that let you develop your own workflow for observability and incident response. Datadog integrates seamlessly with all of your apps and systems from Amazon Web Services, Slack, to Docker, so you can get visibility in minutes.

Go to changelog.com slash datadog to get started for free. Also, our listeners get a free Datadog t-shirt when you start your trial and create your first dashboard. Once again, changelog.com slash datadog and get started for free. And by Hired. Hired matches outstanding people with the world's most innovative tech companies out there. Hired uses an algorithmic job matching tool in combination with a talent advocate who will walk you through the entire process of finding a better job. You might be looking for a more flexible work schedule, more money, or remote jobs so you can travel and see the world. You might be looking for opportunities at Facebook, Mixpanel, or Squarespace, or the many other top tech

companies out there looking for engineers on Hired. You and your skills could be a valuable asset to any of these companies. You just have to take the first step. That first step is Hired.com slash changelog. Go there, learn more. Our listeners get a special $600 hiring bonus when you find your next opportunity on Hired. Once again, Hired.com slash changelog. So we're here with Mike McQuaid And Nadia Ekbal From GitHub And it's been a fun conference

Open source At OSCON The changelog's here GitHub's here GitHub's here Open source alley Whose idea was this? Open source alley First of all, what is it? And then secondly Whose idea was it? So there's a guy called Alistair who's really big into open source. So, we generally call him open source Ali.

And he, no, sorry, that's the worst joke. But I had to make that. Open source Ali is. That was a great joke. I want to say, well, it definitely wasn't either of our ideas. Yeah. It might have been Brandon. Brandon's maybe.

Yeah, Brandon Keepers. Just say it was Brandon. Yeah. Yeah. It's been going on longer than I've been at GitHub. So, definitely wasn't my idea. Okay. So, what is it?

I've got a little bit of a clue. I'm going to go with the one that's been going on for a while. Yeah. It might have been Brandon. Brandon's maybe? Yeah, Brandon Keepers. Just say it was Brandon. Yeah. Yeah. It's been going on longer than I've been at GitHub, so it definitely wasn't my idea. So what is it? I've got a little backstory on this. Oh, you do. I can probably tell you.

I asked Brandon the same question, and Brandon said that this is the third year, and they only do it here at OzCon. Yep. Yes, that is true. And so rather than schlep GitHub, basically, long story short, he said, let's promote open source projects, and that's Open Source Alley. Open Source Alley is like demonstrations of awesome open source and stickers get created. You know, the poster boards are there and you do a great job of like helping those projects share what they're doing to the people who care, basically.

Yeah. And it's nice from that perspective because a conference like this, the projects that tend to have booths are obviously the projects that tend to have some sort of like money behind them and corporate backing maybe or or something like that whereas so much of github and so much of our projects are some craziness has happened here the the actual air ducts are going oh they're moving things over dragging things we've we've reached teardown phase we're in teardown phase here we are literally they're literally tearing it down right next to us. They're tearing it down next to us.

The world is crumbling around us. Continue, continue, Mike. Talk fast because we may die. Sorry, Mike. The nice thing is, I guess the projects that we have in Open Source Alley tend to be those that wouldn't pay money to have a booth here. So we can go and have them and have some representation and blast their logo all over the place and get people to like talk to the people who are running these

projects but like give them a little bit of exposure so this is three years running have do either of you know the impact of this and how that's played out or is this how how informed are you not very not very apparently it's great we love it it was the first year either of us have been involved well they keep inviting you back or at least letting you pay them to come back. Yeah, they let us pay the money. So something's working. Well, there is a transaction in there. Yeah, there is.

I'm sure. Moving on. Let's talk about the projects a little bit because we were lucky enough to have a few of them on the show. Hospital Run, Mimic. That's it. We had an open collective on the show before. That's it.

That we had on. We didn't have an open collective here. No, I saw it. But on the show. In's it. That's what we had on. We didn't have an open collective here. But on the show. In the past. Yes. How are these projects selected and why were they chosen? So we basically asked for, asked kind of some people we knew and we've got like a communication channel with some of the kind of more active GitHub maintainers now.

And we basically asked them to sort of self-select and say if they're interested. And then we kind of reached out to some of the people we know. And then some of it's just plain nepotism, like exorcism and homebrew. Don't tell them that. Yeah, exorcism and homebrew were there because, you know, we work here.

So, you know, we've got to get our promotion. But who doesn't use homebrew? And who doesn't know about exorcism? I guess. Anybody who doesn't know on Mac. Mac port. Yeah, no, I legit had a conversation today with a guy from the SFF And who doesn't know about exorcism? I guess anybody who doesn't know on Mac. Mac port. Yeah, no, I legit had a conversation today with a guy from the SFF who had literally

never heard of Homebrew before. I was like, is this like a package manager, but like by Apple or something? And like, I really explaining like what the con like. Yeah, it was fun. What acronym did you use? What? What? What? What acronym did you use there? Free Software Foundation.

Free Software Foundation, sorry. I thought you called it SFF. I think you just shouted a bunch of letters. Yeah, I said SFF. No, stop it. We'll find out later in the recording. So Netbism works. Netbism works.

Come to GitHub. One person doesn't know about Homebrew. One person. What else have we learned today? Also, there were some people from O'Reilly who also didn't know about Homebrew. What else have we learned today? Also, there were some people from O'Reilly who also didn't know about Homebrew, who I think were in their marketing team, and were like, yeah, it doesn't say the name on your logo.

You should improve that. Obviously, open source is important to GitHub. I feel like that's clear. It's pretty clear. From the founding fathers of GitHub, Chris and PJ and Tom, all the way until now, it does seem like in terms of engagement

with open source developers, maybe indie developers smaller, it seems like there's been a bit of a renewed effort on GitHub's behalf to re-engage and not just participate in the conversation, but help out in certain ways that wasn't happening for a while is that is that just my sense or is that real is that true i would say your sense is very real

okay yeah i mean i think like brandon keeper has moved to kind of being the first person i guess in the company who was like dedicated to working on open source about two years ago right roughly and he spent a while kind of almost like thinking about i mean initially he moved to almost be like i'm gonna get github's open source projects in shape. Like, and then it became more about the community and stuff like that. And I think the real thing that probably gave a lot of people a wake up call at GitHub was Dear GitHub, like last year. And just the impact of realizing that, okay, there's a lot of people in our community who don't feel listened to. Like they don't feel that we're listening

to their concerns. And also like a realization of us internally, like we almost don't have the relationships with these people. Like we may on an individual basis, but we don't as a company have any sort of formal way of having these communications. Like when I speak to people, like as a GitHub-er,

if people had complaints with GitHub, I would say, well, send an email to support and then that will get turned into a feature request. And I appreciate from most people's perspective, that's a black box. They don't get any feedback from that. Like our support team are great and they do email people back when those features get implemented. But people have problems and those problems aren't getting solved. And I feel like we now have more of a communication channel and more people who are dedicated to building those relationships as part of our job so that we can make GitHub better for those people.

There's also been some major and minor features that you all have been doing recently. I think of some of the work that Nadia has done in the team with the open source handbook or the guides, as well as even just recently, which I don't even know if it had any fanfare, but, like, you're now adding, like, license metadata in, like, a very explanatory way to everything

as you're, like, picking. So, like, just making it easier on us when we're making those decisions that are outside of our, you know, developer wheelhouse. Yeah. Smoother. Really helpful. There's some really good things coming in the pipeline, too,

from community and safety team just in terms of helping you manage your communities better and manage those conversations so there are a lot of really good things in the works this year that I'm very excited about

but won't talk about because they're insider stuff but they're coming anything on the horizon you can mention that's like so close considering this

this is going to come out in a couple weeks what can you share I don't want to fuck up closed? Considering this is going to come out in a couple weeks, what can you share? I don't want to fuck up. So close. Yeah, nothing is guaranteed. Nice try, Adam. But, yeah, I mean, I think one thing that's changing, too, just about the way that we're unrolling some of these

things is our team has worked harder this year to establish these formal relationships with open source maintainers and some of our biggest fans on GitHub instead of it being these individual relationships making it so that they feel like they can talk to GitHub. And so as we're releasing these new product features and stuff, we're actively talking to those maintainers and getting feedback from them and following them in the process. Yeah, totally. So that's something I'm really proud of.

It's shortened up. Yeah, totally. So that's something I'm really proud of. It shortened up a tax line. Yeah, I think we've kind of realized because we have big enterprise sales customers who, in the early days of GitHub, they'd ask us what was on our roadmap and we were like, oh, well we don't talk about that. And then when a company's looking at spending vast amounts of money

with GitHub, obviously that's not always really good enough anymore. And I think we're now realizing that that's an appropriate thing to do with maintainers as well. We have people who are really invested and are really... Right, because if you expect maintainers to continue to invest in open source in general, you would expect to give them proper tools to do so, or even education to do so. Yeah.

So I think we are beginning to open up a bit more with that and opening up with the community and not making everything like a public announcement, but like reaching out to people who are going to be affected by these changes and getting their feedback

on them before, like, we released. The open source guides that you did, is that focused towards maintainers or on ramping contributors? What is the purpose

of the guides? All of it. All of it. Yeah, originally, the idea was the guides? All of it. All of it. Yeah. Originally, the idea was to have information publicly available for maintainers or aspiring maintainers so that that kind of knowledge is shared among the whole community. But I think some of the most popular content has actually been some of the stuff that we wrote about how to contribute to open source in the first place and find a project. And that's also been coming around even internally, having that information out there and taking a stand and saying this is the way that open source gets built first place and find a project. And that's also been coming around, even internally, having that information out there

and taking a stance and saying, this is the way that open source gets built has fed into our product itself. So it's been really good. We should probably let you two go because they are literally tearing down. Rolling up the carpet around us. And if you heard that loud roar back there,

the audience, that was a Corvette driving out of here. Actually, a bear tried to eat Adam. It's not his Corvette. She's got to go Corvette driving out of here. Actually, a bear tried to eat Adam. It's Nadia's Corvette. She's got to go. My bare hands. We're out of here. Mike, Nadia, thank you. My bare hands.

Get it? Thank you. My bare hands. You heard it from Jared. Had to get a pun in there. You got to beat Mike in the pun game. Bye, OzCon. All right.

Thanks for tuning into The Change Law this week. We love doing shows like this where we go out into the community, meet people face-to-face. A place like OzCon is where you meet friends, meet new people, enjoy the open source community. And this is what we absolutely love to do. If you enjoyed this show, share it with a friend or two. Rate us on iTunes. Thanks to our sponsors, ElixirConf, CircleCI, Datadog, and Hired. Also, thanks to Fastly, our bandwidth partner.

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