The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Open Karma and Design Love for OSS (Interview)

Episode Date: October 26, 2013

Adam and Andrew talk with Justine Arreche a Designer at Travis CI and Sebastian Gräßl a Freelance Developer. Together, they're the creators of Open Karma, a tool to help bridge the gap between developers and designers in open source (they're bringing some design love to OSS).

Welcome back, everyone. This is The Change Log, where our members support a blog, podcast, and weekly email that covers what's fresh and what's new in open source. Check out the blog at thechangelog.com, our past shows at 5by5.tv slash changelog, and subscribe to The Change Log Weekly. It's our weekly email covering everything that hits our open source radar. You do not want to miss it. Ships on Saturday. Subscribe at the changelog.com slash weekly. The show is hosted by myself, Adam Stachowiak, as well as

Andrew Thorpe. Andrew, say hello. Yo, yo, what's going on? This is lucky episode 109, man, 109. So today's show is sponsored by DigitalOcean and if you're not familiar with digital ocean they've been sponsoring the show for a little bit now we've partnered with them we love what they're doing they're doing some really awesome stuff for the community and we want to

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That's right, 600,000 cloud servers out there in the cloud. And you can get started with DigitalOcean today for free using our promo code. It's the changelog October, which will give you a $10 hosting credit, basically two months free. Spin up your cloud server today with DigitalOcean at digitalocean.com. And without further ado, we're joined today by Justine Ariche, designer at Travis CI, and Sebastian Gressel. He's a freelance web developer, and together they are the creators of OpenKarma, a tool to help bridge the gap between developers

and designers. Welcome to the show, guys. Hello. So, design in open source source it's a problem right it's a huge problem uh i was unaware of it that it was even a problem until recently and i guess before we kick off the show officially justine why don't we start with you give a quick introduction to who you are and kind of what you do and sebastian follow up from her all All right. So, yeah, I'm Justine. I work for Travis CI as their lead designer. And basically what I do is I've worked in everything from print shops to consultancies and software. And lately my big passion has been trying to get involved with open source projects, which I found out quickly were lacking in design, always looked terrible, didn't function, and pretty much needed as much design help as they could get.

And Sebastian, how about yourself? Hi, I'm Sebastian. I'm working as a developer for almost eight years now, and currently I'm freelancingancing doing some smaller projects for clients and trying to get money in and also on the side working on open source projects and trying to contribute to as much as possible. Awesome so you guys kind of met somehow why don't you kind of give us a little bit of a introduction as to how you guys came about and you decided to start this. Who came up with the idea and where did it come from? Sebastian and I met at your camp this

year. I was speaking and he was attending. I met him the first night I got to Berlin and we just kind of hit it off and hung out for pretty much the rest of the conference and just kind of palled around for a while. And then a couple months ago, I think it was maybe about two months ago, I sent out a tweet saying that I was a designer, and if you had an open source project that needed design love to ping me. And it is currently at 907 retweets, and I've gotten hundreds of emails from developers all over the world.

And that's kind of when I started talking to Sebastian. I was just like, dude, I cannot do all of this by myself, and I feel really bad. Like, I can't keep turning people down. what if we made a service that would kind of pair up designers like myself that are qualified and want to work in an open source development atmosphere? What if we like found a way to put them together with open source projects? And so we just kind of started brainstorming with that, like, Sebastian would ping features off of me, and I would kind of like say, okay, that's good. And like, pretty much what we settled on for now now at least is that as long as your open source project isn't making any money, all of the design work will be free as well.

So it's kind of just a mutual helping of the community between, you know, designers that are willing to work for free as well as open source projects that aren't making any money and just need some tender love and care in the design department. Awesome. So essentially you notice like a glaring deficiency in the open source community. Open source, while the open source code out there tends to be some of the most beautiful code that you can find, most of the interfaces, not most, a lot of the interfaces you find for the projects that have an interface are struggling pretty bad.

Why do you think it is that you guys, I don't know, do you think that the open source community has not really been that welcoming to designers traditionally? Or what do you think the reason is behind that and why your tweet, I mean just a little tweet, got so much attention? I have a personal theory on it. There's like two things behind it. And it's how I even got involved in Travis. I lost my passport in Berlin. I was stuck an extra couple of days and ended up hanging out with Josh. And he just asked if I could put an extra pair of eyes on Travis's UI. And I said, sure. And that just kind of ended up being a full-time gig. But I just don't think developers know a lot of designers.

And then also I know a lot of designers, and they either have never worked in software or anything tech related other than coming up with like a fake mobile UI. That's really just a Photoshop mock or like a lot of designers selfishly, like they just want to make money. And so I don't think a lot of them are willing to put themselves out there for free, but there can't just be me. There has to be more designers willing to kind of lend a helping hand for the greater good of open source. Right. So Open Karma is essentially going to be a tool that helps to connect the two, right? So developers and designers both will sign up for

this service, or you guys are still in just kind of gathering information and getting people excited. But whenever this thing launches, which we'll get into later um you'll you'll be able to basically just connect designers to developers you said that as long as the open source project is not making any money then the designers that are willing to do this will have to do it for free or you know according to open karma is is does that mean that you won't support like any exchange of funds or anything like that through open karma um Well, Sebastian and I talked about this before, and it's kind of, I think at least for like first launch of the site, like it just makes more sense to make sure that everybody's not making any money on it. If you want to go ahead and like donate to someone's get tip, that's your prerogative.

We can't really enforce you not doing that. And sure, everybody likes to get tipped. But more importantly, I don't want to deceive anybody hopping on thinking that they're going to make money off the bat. If you get tipped in the end, that's great. You did a great job. And somebody obviously felt that you did, but don't feel like you're going to make any money out of it. That's not what it's about. And that's kind of where the name Open Karma came from. It's more like karma points. Like, you're just going to get paid in kindness. Well, this is one of the things. One of the things about just open source development is you kind of get in there and you get your name out there. You start to contribute to some projects

and you start to help out. And it comes back around when you are, you know, when you're in a situation and you've open sourced your own project and you need help. Well, that's the community, right? The community is there because you started to insert yourself into this community and, you know, you have a project that people love. So they will give back to you. So this is something I don't think designers necessarily traditionally have, you know, I don't know. I don't know what the right way to say it is. But if you look at a lot of the old design, you know, procedures or policies or standards or however you want to put it, it was kind of like hoard it and hold on to it for yourself. Right. I mean, it was like,

don't share this with people because it's your time and money that went into it. So you need to be compensated for it. And, you know, there's no, it doesn't take a genius to, to realize that design and development are growing together, right? They need each other because as the tools grow, the design and the UI around them need to be nicer, need to be easier to use. So they're going to grow together. So I look at this as an opportunity for designers to be proactive and start to jump into the community. And then when you have an idea down the road and you want developers to help work on this idea, it literally has given you karma points, right? You have your name out there and people will help you because you helped them. Yeah. I mean, that was something else we

talked about down the line that for right now, it's really just about helping open source projects get a designer on board. But we talked about down the line that, you know, say I have an idea, like, for example, open karma, and I don't know how to build the back end, then I can be paired up with the developer who maybe saw that, you know, I got some karma points on my side, like, I've helped out the community and like, he can help me out, or she can help me out. So that's kind of just like, I think maybe because I worked in a consultancy for two and a half years and I knew developers that were either contributing to open source or there were a few

projects we were allowed to, you know, make open source. I kind of got thrown into a community I wasn't really aware existed. And through that, I just kind of saw the power of open source. And, you know, like I pull stuff down all the time that like I need help with, you know, I can't really write that much backend code by myself. So I'm just as guilty of, you know, kind of not mooching, but like, you know, kind of partaking in the open source community is like anybody else. Partaking is a good word to use. Partaking. Yeah. I've been nomming on the open source community for a while. So that's kind of where it came from. I wanted to help out. On that note, Justine, on your homepage, you've got a number of other projects that you've got listed there.

So like Ruby conferences, Git immersion, and a number of other things. Are these things that you worked on as kind of like the predecessor to what Open Karma has become? Or is this things you did for money? Or is this, I'm just wondering, like Redcar Editor and some other things that you've worked on? It's a mix. So because I did work with mostly all developers for the last two and a half years, three years, some of my co-workers or friends would need help on projects like Redcar. And so I just kind of said, hey, yeah, like I'll work on that. I'm looking for a reason to illustrate a new icon. But then other things like Git Immersion and Ruby conferences, those are all sponsored by my former employers. And so they were either, like, Git Immersion was a complete redesign of the tutorial UI,

and then the Ruby conferences were just things that I volunteered to kind of help out on when I had Slack time at work. Did Git Immersion release or just launch recently this version, this updated version? I would say it was about a year and a half, two years ago. I was thinking for some reason it was like in the last couple months for some reason i thought i'd saw it come across my

stream but i guess i was wrong there but you were wrong i was wrong so i've got so go ahead go to andrew all right i was gonna say i this is kind of like a almost off topic question but to get sebastian into the mix that's what i was going to do. Yeah, he's being so quiet. Yeah. Hey, start talking. All right? As somebody who has worked in open source, worked in development,

done a lot of stuff, what does it feel like? I don't even necessarily know how to ask this question, but obviously I have someone like Justine who's a very talented designer, and she's trying to build a tool to attract developers to other designers. So it seems to me pretty important that the design of Open Karma is executed almost perfectly. Do you feel pressure like that?

Like, is that a weird kind of pressure that you ever feel when you're working on this thing that you're the only developer that is almost going to like try to attract designers and developers to this thing? I don't know uh not necessarily i just i do the back end justine does the front end i trust her with doing a awesome design than she does and essentially developers are not different from other people they are looking at what looks pretty or what does not look pretty the only difference is that if you're looking at a piece of software design becomes secondary if

you know that the stuff below is extremely good right so so the it's almost like these layers. You have the design, the usability, and the back end. And if you're confident that it's all solid, then it's all solid. Exactly. I mean, for example, Audacity, which we are using to record the show, the interface, the icon is terrible.

Yeah, they could totally use Open Karma. No offense to that. I wasn't going to say anything. That's for sure. Yeah, but if you're using it, it's actually a super nice piece of software, and you have a lot of filters, and you can work with it. But if you are just a user, not a developer, or you're just, I don't know, just recording for fun, you don't really know if it's good or bad.

You have to dig a little deeper and it's just the face that you see first, but you have to really look at it to know that it's good. We're also in a world, I mean, today, I mean, this show tends to be more timeless than it is timely. But today Apple had some announcements. They announced some new iPads, new MacBooks. And obviously the world – I guess the tech world and I guess becoming more consumer too is a lot more focused on the design and usability and the aesthetics of something. So the more beautiful something becomes or the more aesthetically pleasing something becomes, the inherent value it tends to have because, oh, it looks good. It must be good, right?

I would say I would kind of agree with that. That's something I usually touch on when I'm speaking at conferences on design. It's kind of like if you open up a website and it looks shitty, then I'm kind of less inclined to trust the website, but you can recognize if something's good right off the bat, you won't, you won't really know it's good. You'll just kind of have this inherent trust and added value to it. And so, um, that's one thing that I just kind of feel bad about for open source projects is that like, you, like, you don't know that you're looking shitty, but you kind of like anybody who opens it, know that you're looking shitty but you kind of like anybody who opens it's gonna like know that it kind of is lacking aesthetically but as soon

as you open up something and it's both as sebastian touched on like really well done on the back end but as an added bonus like has a cool icon and a great user interface like it's just like all this added value and kind of uh wow yeah it's like you just kind of, you can kind of feel it. It's something that you just, like you said, you inherently trust. But let me ask something. Developers love refactoring. They love improving, right? So you write something once, it works, it gets the job done.

But like, I don't know, open source developers especially seem to just like fall in love with refactoring their code and just making it always better and always better. And designers, I mean, I can't speak for designers here, but it seems like the tendency for something like Open Karma would be for somebody to create a design one time. And then because developers, you know, they love iterating their software, but I don't know that they necessarily love iterating design. So let's say a designer comes and a developer, they meet up and a designer works on the project for them and then the developer executes that. How do you prevent it from just sitting in that design forever and not iterating on the design and improving that part of it too? I mean, you really can't.

There's no way to force someone to continue to work on a project. What I would hope is that many of the designers that will be signing up for Open Karma will be people like me who create long-lasting relationships with the developers they're pairing with. And instead of spreading yourself thin and working on 10 different projects, just shipping a UI, shipping an icon or a

logo and just be like okay bye like i would kind of hope that maybe you get involved with a couple projects and then keep up with like long lasting relationship with that developer and like hopefully that's what comes to be but in all reality i can't really like tell designers that they have to keep iterating on the product as long as as the developers are interested in you know it could be they've maybe in like some open source projects really just all they want is an icon and they just need like kind of a you know a foot in the door and there could be a designer that has like that extra slack time to help them out with that and then there's other projects that are going to need like complete UIs and, and just like wireframing and stuff like that. So like, that's kind of one

of the features we are hoping to implement in Open Karma is that designers will sign up and they'll kind of have these checkboxes of what they're willing to kind of dive into. And it might change based on their availability, maybe they got on a new project. But so, you know, if you only have the availability or desire to work on icons or logos, you just check that off. And so that when a developer open source team comes on and they're looking for something specific, we'll be able to filter those results. So you're not getting paired up with a designer that has no interest in working on like what you need. Right. So it's almost like, and I think the goal of Open Karma is not necessarily just to like elicit somebody to work on this one thing for you.

It's like how to actually build, it's like almost a tool to help developers and designers build relationships with each other. I've been kind of calling it match.com for designers and developers, like kind of like making these pairs, these pairings, and hopefully you fall in open source love or something like that. I mean, I think it would be awesome if through Open Karma designers, because actually one of the things that I talk about a lot is like people are afraid to get started in open source. I think a lot of developers are afraid to get started in open source because, you know,

not an inferiority complex, but just like, I don't, if you've never put your code out there for other developers to review, then it can be scary to think of, you know, to, to people who are comfortable, it's like community and comfort, but to people who have never done it, it's, it's scary and it's unfamiliar to, to have people like look at your code. Right. And I think that developers in general, and I don't know, I mean, I have a lot of friends that are designers, and I feel like my developer friends can tend to be kind of clicky, right? And almost like, hey, let's get together and I'll talk about, you know, like, just a bunch of developer stuff. And it's like a little click that we have where it could

be hard for a designer, unless they're like super extroverted and super confident to like, inject themselves into that group, right? And so open karma has the potential to, to, to bring down that barrier a little bit. And I think to me, that's like the biggest win that you guys can get. I don't know. How do you feel about that? I mean, that's what I'm really hoping for. I mean, I am an extrovert, but it's still really hard for me to participate in conversations at conferences where, or even like around like the lunch table when i used to have like an office team like just listening to all the developer babble can kind of become overwhelming for people who don't speak ruby

or closure or anything like that like as soon as i start hearing anything about prams i'm just like i don't know what you're talking about can we we talk about like the Knicks game or something? And I could care less about the Knicks, but I at least would understand more. And so it is kind of hard for designers to plunge into that unless they're used to it. And a lot of designers might shy away from those kinds of situations because, you know, they might not feel like included or they might feel like they're not going to understand anything. And, you know, they might not feel like included or they might feel like they're not going to understand anything. And, you know, that's kind of, I think, a problem that I would hope developers would kind of work on is when you do encounter people like me or other designers. Like, at least if you're going to talk about, like, tech, kind of include me in it or explain things to me in a way that I understand. And, you know, that's kind of like a whole nother

side tangent I could get involved in, but, you know, be a little bit more inclusive of designers because we're not going to want to help you on your projects if you feel like, if we feel like you're excluding us from your culture as well. Yeah. I also feel like there's an opportunity here too, to kind of like trade in a sense, you know, where, and I guess, you know, karma is kind of part of it and maybe some guess karma is kind of part of it and maybe some kickback is kind of part of it as well, but not so much in terms of dollars, but just in terms of connections and opportunities.

But I'm thinking like if I wanted to learn a bit more about Ruby, I might pair up with a Rubyist who knows a lot about Ruby, offer my design chops, offer some of my skill sets and abilities to their project, and in trade offer some, you know, kind of pairing session or mentoring, you know, it kind of seems like an opportunity to even connect at a personal level and kind of trade or cross train for, for example.

Yeah. I mean, that's how I ended up going even to like Ruby conferences is I gave quite a few times a talk on design for developers and kind of breaking it down in ways that developers can understand. And that kind of spun off into a couple other talks and how can you better pair with your designer. And one thing I always harp on is take the opportunity to learn from each other. Sit down and pair with me or virtually pair with me

because there's a lot I can learn from you. And there's, you know, just as much you can learn from me. And the better we know about what each other has to do, the better we can make awesome things. Like it's that easy. Yeah. I think a lot of developers struggle with like, because if you think about it, the semantics around development, right? Developers have this like, and we talk about this a lot, but Kenneth Wrights was on the show and he called it tribal knowledge. So developers have this like tribal knowledge of this. You have the just the problem solving, the semantics of the language you're comfortable with, the you know, the just the stack and all this stuff. And it's all this knowledge that you pick up over time. And the language is very different from just like your typical, you know, normal everyday English. And I think designer, designers speak a language that's a little bit easier to understand just for like,

you know, Joe Schmo, like myself with design. So when I, when I talk to my friends that are designers, they, the language they're speaking is very, very easy for me to understand. I mean, as long as I understand like what gradients and drop shadows and stuff are, then the language is easy to understand. So I think that like, there's think that there's this tendency for a lot of developers to think that they almost like, not that they know design, but that there's nothing there to learn, right? Because they know the words. And it's like the knowledge is there. It's this very intense knowledge that designers have, just like developers.

And so if there's a way to get them to share that knowledge with each other, now, you're probably never, you're probably never going to convert a, you know, someone that's just purely a designer into like a systems developer. And you're probably never going to convert vice versa systems developer into a designer, right? But if you can help to, like, bring down the barriers of knowledge between them, then I think they work better together. Like I can work better with the designer when I'm, when I better understand and respect what they're doing and vice versa. And so that's something that open karma can really help with. I think that's something I'm really hoping for because there's a tendency for, and this is kind of a generalization, but something I've picked up on a lot is the tendency for developers to define my job as making things look pretty, which actually

really pisses me off because I don't think it's fair to... Sebastian said that, by the way. Yeah, Sebastian said that. And that's why he's being quiet because he's getting yelled at. Yeah. But I find it to be really insulting because that would be like me telling a like you know introducing my developer friend and saying like this person types on keys really hard like i don't know um it's like i worked really hard to learn what i know and still continue this to this day to like make sure i'm understanding user experience properly and like there's all these things about color theory and there's so much more to design than just, you know, oh, I like blue. So I made this button blue.

There's real science behind it. There's science, man. The cones in your eyeballs and like the psychology. So like that's kind of another thing is hoping to again. And it really depends on the people participating. You have to be open to communicating in the same way that like me and sebastian have to communicate just to work on this project and as long as you're willing to do that you guys can learn like so much from each other and it's only going to help developers

understand design more and i'm you know i'm going to have to learn more and i don't know pretty cool i'll look at the barrier right there though is like if you like you had said the kind of hurdle was for the other person the developer not to really understand you know and you keyed off this which was like to not really understand design but you know know some of the language and lingo and kind of feel like they've got they've got it but i feel like as a as a designer myself you know whenever i help the other side um understand that i know about user experience, I understand about usability, I understand the psychology behind why a button is so-and-so or why copy works a certain way. Once I help them understand that I've got more than just the ability to make things look nice, I feel like there's this exchange and this aha moment because they realize that I've got such care for my craft, the same as they do

for understanding that a method, you know, should be a certain way or the there's certain idioms in Ruby or whichever language they're working with. And they understand that we both have similar paths and focuses are just in different genres of things. I totally agree. And I don't think there's ever going, well, you know, I'm sure there's a few like special unicorns out there that can do both design and development like super well. But like, I work really hard to make sure that like you said, I'm putting a lot of care and attention into the things that I'm designing. And there's a reason why I'm making the line height a certain height and why I don't make a paragraph line exceed a certain amount of characters. And so like, I just hope that developers will have the opportunity to see that designers, like you said, kind of like have their own craft and we need to work together, but I'm not just sitting around like screwing around on Photoshop just to make something look nice. There's kind of that mutual respect you need to have. And I get that from most developers that I either sit down and talk with or who see me speak at conferences. They

kind of, you know, like you said, like, oh, you do know things, you know, things like I know things, we just know different things, but we need our things to come together. Right, exactly. You're in the Ruby community mostly, right? So that what I've found is – and I can't speak for other communities, but the Ruby community specifically is very, I don't know, appreciative and open to design and usability. I think that's something that for whatever reason has kind of gotten a hold of the community. I think that's why you find a lot of like, you know, Justine, I didn't know that you were doing all the front end development on Open Karma. But that's a trend that I think is a good one that a lot of designers are doing a lot of like not just necessarily front end development, but also, you know, like mockups in HTML and stuff like that, which I think helps to not that designers need to earn the respect of developers. But speaking as a developer, I think we can be pretty stubborn and we can be pretty standoffish. So I think that designers are being more proactive than developers are in that area.

And I think that overall – I mean like we keep harping on I guess, but there's these barriers between them. And anything that can make these barriers come down to help the respect and communication between these two sides that are working together is a good thing. Right. We're the same, but different comes to mind for me. Like we're the same, but we're different. Right. We're the same that I care about design. I care about using the right tools and the right tools might be designing the browser.

The right tool for me might be Photoshop. It might be some other tool that I've found that works really well for my flow, but it's saying it's somehow getting past that point of we're the same but different. So I feel like once you get there, you're okay. Yeah. So, Justine, you and Sebastian kind of are the first example of this working. You guys had a chance meeting at a Ruby conference, or I think that's what you said. And if it wasn't for that meeting, you guys might not be able to work on this together.

But what has your experience been like just to kind of work in one-on-one with another developer and working on this project together? And what would it have been like? I mean, do you think there was a bunch of other developers out there waiting to work on it with you? Or what would it have been like if you would not have had that chance meeting, do you think? Well, Sebastian and i have the really fortunate i guess part of our relationship where we are really good friends and like i didn't like i could talk to sebastian about anything and i've known him for such a short

time so i think that's where it kind of helps us like have that mutual respect and like he trusts me with the front end and the design and and like I trust him with the back end because we are close friends. But I definitely have more developer friends and I have designer friends and I'm sure someone else could have like helped me out with it. But I find myself to be really fortunate that I have a really good friend working on it with me so that when we're up late, like we can be hacking on this while at the same time having a relaxed conversation. So it's a really good position to be in for this kind of intimate project. We kind of call it our creative child because it's just something we're kind of working on. I don't know. He's just a good friend, so I think it works out really well that way. And probably wouldn't have worked out as well if I was just doing it with some developer i met on the internet you mean you guys actually are building a relationship working together yeah we're getting pretty serious i wouldn't be surprised if people thought we were in a relationship via our twitter status updates

oh yeah well people make a lot of assumptions and, you know, you know what they say. That's what the internet's for. So, awesome. So, Sebastian. Yeah. What do you want to see happen with Open Karma? Well, I think, I just hope it works out somehow. And I think the most important part is

to actually get designers excited about Open Karma and get involved and I think that can be achieved by going ahead and showing examples of designers working in open source for example John

from Ghost because essentially that's how he started he got involved in an open source project and now he's doing his own open source project and yeah actually we're going to interview him as well awesome so let's talk a little bit about

Open Karma the future you guys are in I don't know if you would call this it's not beta you guys are just like collecting information and getting people excited what is like the roadmap for you guys you're going to have any kind of beta or when are you going to launch or has any of that been talked about um we've been talking about a little bit like I'm in the process of moving and so is Sebastian and we're both moving to Berlin um so hopefully once things settle down a bit we can kind of finalize some of the wireframes

I've been working on. Like, I think the most important thing that I at least want to focus on before we even launch is making sure that we have a good like workflow. We don't want anybody to get frustrated trying to, you know, pair up with the designer, you know, vice versa on this. So I think planning is even more critical than kind of how it turns out is if I spend more time planning it, then it's going to end up being a really good tool to use. And kind of what Sebastian said is I really would like to start generating more designer interest because I've had tons of developers just like, you know, sign up or like speak up and, you know, really reach out.

And that's great. But I don't want to have a flood of like 900 developers start logging onto this site and have five designers on board. And like, you know, that's kind of something else we're going to have to predict is, is there going to have to be a waiting list? And like, you know, that just, that kind of gets into what we talked about earlier, where designers have to kind of like design and ditch, and that's not a good scenario to be in either. So we'll see. I mean, like, hopefully, you know, I can't be the only designer out there who is interested in working with open source. And I know I'm not, I've reached out to a couple people I used to work with. And so we've got a few on board, definitely. But it's going to take a little while before we get even more designers so that we kind of have a one to one ratio, or I would even be happy with like a one to five ratio or something.

Yeah, of course, developers are flocking to this. Oh, yeah, free design. Give it. I'll hear it. Yeah. I mean, that's pretty much like my Twitter just like blew up in the last two months. And I was like, Jesus, you guys are coming off real desperate. Take me out to dinner first. So we need to find designers. We need to get designers excited. So you don't want to obviously say a date you're going to launch, but is that kind of the milestone you're looking for? You want to even out the designers before you guys even really consider like launching this? That's my personal preference is to kind of have more designers on board.

Otherwise, I feel like there's going to have to be some kind of feature where we only allow a certain amount of developers in at first and kind of test that and see how that goes. We'll probably have to reiterate on some workflow things, but that might be a solution as well. and do like, you know, we'll probably have to like reiterate on some workflow things, but that might be a solution as well. It's just like, I would really hate to have all, you know, maybe we get 10 designers on board, get inundated with requests in the same way that I was. And like, you know, it would just flop again. So maybe it could be kind of even like mailbox where they

only let a certain amount of people in at a time and then like just progressively let more people in as, as they had kind of bandwidth for. Yeah. I mean, the designers are out there that want to get involved. We just, it's like the struggle, the predecessor for you guys is going to be to, to figure out the channels to, to get in touch with all those designers. And I think this is a common problem that actually a lot of services that are kind of coming up or dealing with. And that is like, how do you, how do you get in touch with your target audience, the people you need to get in touch with without it just looking like, you know, just another request in my inbox? You know what I mean? Like, um, how, how you got, you know,

I don't even know what the answer to that might be. I got some, I got, I don't know if it's time to share ideas, but I've got some ideas if you're looking for ideas on how to work it. Oh, yeah. Let me share some ideas. I mean, this is a show, right? Yeah. This is, in fact, a show. I think the way that – and we've had Sasha Grief.

I don't know if you're familiar with him, but we've had him on the show before. He recently wrote a book on Meteor and has even done some design in open source. I think he's done stuff with Ruby. I think it was Locomotive, the open source thing there. And then he also did some stuff with Ruby Motion. And then now he's doing some stuff with Meteor and he's even kind of getting into more of a developer side. But he says he's a designer and I know he's a designer, but that's not the point. The point is that Sasha runs this thing called Folio, and essentially it's a list. You could probably ask him, but I think the model is free and open in the way that you can describe it.

But just having a list of designers and somebody who has an open source project – so let's say the developer is essentially the client, for lack of better terms, right? You've got a list of designers that get an email from whoever, and they email it into Open Karma. You guys vet it, approve it, look at it, make sure it meets your criteria, and then you pass that along to your list of approved and ready-to-work designers,

and they say, hey, I'll take that, and first to grab it is first to get it. And it say, hey, I'll take that. And first to grab it is first to get it. And it's essentially like that way you can have a list and they're not on the hook to like do whatever you have to manage schedules. They take it whenever they want. And then the open source developers, they can just simply just say, hey, here's my new project. I'm planning to launch next month or I've got some design needs. Here's the details. And you can work with them back and forth, Justine and you sebastian and can just make sure it's good to go and then pass that along once it's made it past your barrier and that's what sasha does with folio where he kind of acts as that buffer between both parties to

make sure that the designers aren't seeing anything that isn't vetted by him that isn't blessed by him in fact that it's and the fact that it's something good for the community right and then you know the developers who are on the the side, the client for lack of better terms, is making sure that they've got their information in front of the right kind of eyeballs, the right kind of people who want to help them. And you're helping curate both sides of the list. Yeah, that's something that also I've brought up in brainstorming sessions is the last thing I want to do is pair up a good open source project

that I think is a good project. The last thing I want to do is pair them up with a designer who's kind of clueless. And I think that there are a lot of designers out there that might want to help out but maybe aren't quite ready yet. Maybe they haven't been involved in tech that long. Maybe they, you know, don't know that much about UX. There are a lot of print designers out there trying to get tech jobs because there isn't a lot of print.

And I think that's where a lot of designers keep getting, um, like a bad rap. Like, I feel like when people meet me, they're not quite sure. And kind of like what you said, I have to prove myself as like knowing my shit and that I'm like, not just someone who hands off flattened PSDs and, you know, tells you to go develop it. I really would hate to see anything like that happening. And so how do we kind of manage making sure that where you've got quality designers on board and not, you know, not just anybody out there, it's not going to be Craigslist. Yeah. So to anyone who kind of is interested in applying as a designer,

what should they do? Just go to it's open-karma.com? Yeah, open-karma.com. And if you sign up for our mailing list, it would be nice if you scroll all the way to the bottom, there's kind of like sign up to, I think it's like sign up to keep in touch or something like that. But there's a form. And if you fill out the form, there's a couple of fields. And if, I don't know if it's your first name, your last name, just maybe say like, hey, you're a designer. Because that's really what I'm kind of focused on.

We've got so much dev outreach. I really want to like ramp up the designer aspect of it. And it's, uh, be nice to know the people signing up kind of which side they're on. Right. So how about if we just encourage people to reach out to you on Twitter, if they're signing up as a designer, that'd be great. So what is your, what is your Twitter, Twitter, what is that? Your Twitter handle? That'd be great. So what is your Twitter handle? I think I combined those into one word. It's Saltine Justine, like Saltine, like the cracker. Saltine, at Saltine Justine.

So if you're a designer that is interested, sign up for the newsletter, or sorry, sign up for the sign up. And I say newsletter because it's a MailChimp sign-up. I don't know. It's not really a newsletter so much as when we launch, we're going to be like, hey. It's a list. Sign up for the list. And reach out to at Saltine Justine and say you're a designer and you're interested in helping out.

The more designers, the more people that reach out as a designer, I think the sooner we'll see this incredible project get going. Definitely. So I think that we are going to have you guys back on the show when this thing is launched and you have tons of awesome open source projects kind of spawning out of this thing, and it's going to be real cool to see. On that note, Andrew, I kind of feel like, are you a fan of Oprah? This is kind of a side note, but I think it's a funny one. Are you a fan of Oprah?

The host? The Oprah, right. Yeah, the Oprah. I'm like, what else is there? She's got this show where it says, Where Are They Now? And I feel like that's what we need to do. Because we've had people on the show, we need to have them back on the show. Where are you now?

Yeah, yeah. Unless it's really sad. Sorry, go ahead. Unless it's really sad and you don't want to see where they are yeah where are you now uh you know move along um no the uh we've had a lot of people on the show for some reason recently i feel like where the projects haven't launched yet and that's kind of cool right so we can kind of kind of be there for like the release parties and i think that's kind of cool, right? So we can kind of be there for the release parties. And I think that's a neat thing. So no, we definitely, we're coming up to a few months before. I throw that out a lot there, but it's probably been a couple months now since the first time I said, we'll have to have you back on the show.

So we need to go through the archive and find people that have some success stories. I know Ghost launched, and we need to talk to people again. Yeah. But I do think we could go on, but for the sake of keeping it under an hour, unless you guys have anything else to say, we'll kind of go ahead and jump into our interview questions. Do it. So we ask the same three questions for our new listeners

to our guests on every show, and we have two guests here, so that means six questions. So for you, Justine, the first question is for a call to arms, so I can assume what you're going to say, That means six questions. So for you, Justine, the first question is for a call to arms. So I can assume what you're going to say, but for the community that's listening, what do you want them to do to kind of get involved? Well, if there are any designers listening, please reach out.

But also for developers who work with designers, if you work in a shop or you personally know designers who have worked in tech before and might be interested, please ask them to reach out because they might not be listening, but you might know that they're there and they would be interested. So kind of hit up all aspects of it. Gotcha. Sebastian, what about yourself? Same thing or got anything extra? I would second that and say if you know signer, grab him and make him sign up. Sit him down at the desk or her and make him sign up for openkarma.com. Exactly. Awesome.

Justine, if you weren't doing, maybe not Open Karma, but if you weren't working at Travis or just doing what you're doing now, what would you rather be doing? I would probably, oh, I don't know. I'd probably either be a vet or just a regular artist. Nice. Starving artist or a vet. That's awesome. Nice. Definitely the starving artist kind.

That's the best kind of artist. When people talk about art, that's the only kind that I even think about. I'm like, that's the best kind of art. That's the real art. Well, yeah. Once you stop eating for long enough, you start hallucinating,, that's the best kind of art. That's the real art. Well, yeah, once you stop eating for long enough, you start hallucinating, and that's when the real art happens.

What about you, Sebastian? I probably would do much more mountain climbing and travel a lot, and not sit like 16 hours a day in front of the computer. Nice. Just rotting away. Yeah. Exactly.

Awesome. That might be the first mountain climbing answer. We've got a lot of outdoor answers, but maybe the first time that anyone's ever said mountain climbing, so I got respect for that. The last one, Justine, is for like a programmer hero is what we call it, but really just somebody in your life that has kind of influenced you to get you to the point you're at now. Leon Gersing. I used to work with him at Edgecase, and now he works at GitHub. Leon was really instrumental in making me believe that I could understand development programming terms, and he always had a way of explaining things to me in a way that I could understand. When I asked him, Leon, what's a kernel?

And I was like, not the popcorn kind, like the kind you guys were talking about today. And he's just really good at explaining that to me. And so he really got me kind of confident and involved. And I owe a lot of thanks to Leon. And Leon Gersing, you said is a GitHubber, is that right? Yeah. Awesome. And Sebastian, what about yourself?

I would say Jeffrey Zeldman. Oh, nice. yeah everyone knows him uh i think it was the first book exactly i mean i that was the first book i ever read about uh developing hml and css and it's been the bible for me ever since and yeah yeah you're talking about what was his book Designing with Web Standards Web Standards yeah that's right and he's still

steering the developers especially from the developers in the right direction which is pretty nice yeah I think he's a good guy I think that The developers are especially prone to develop us in the right direction, which is pretty nice. Yeah, I think he's a good guy. I think that – well, I think he's had his mark in the industry. That's for sure. He's a fellow 5x5er too.

He's got the big web show here on 5x5, a very popular show. Man, he's done lots of cool stuff. I mean just around podcasting in the community he's got a list apart a book apart uh a thing apart i don't know he's got all sorts of events apart yeah everything apart yeah jeffrey is uh is a good guy i wish uh wish we had the type of show where it would make sense to have him on but yeah it doesn't doesn't show for some reason bummer bummer um let's see so yeah i mean that was that was the questions i like your answers i'm not climbing that's a that's a good one for sure i was thinking about mike parham for some reason when he said that because

mike works at outdoors company yeah climb.com yeah yeah i was kind of thinking about that one but yeah well i'm pretty happy with sitting on my ass all the time. So whatever other career I would have, it would still involve that. Yeah, a vet. And what was your other one? An artist. Yeah, that's a lot of sitting. An artist. Yeah.

I mean. Yeah. Vets can be somewhat. They can walk. They stand. Oh, yeah. We need the vets, man. I love our vet for our dog.

Well, that's it for this show. I want to thank both you guys for coming on the show, Dusty and Sebastian. You guys have a really cool thing you're doing here. Whatever support we can give you as the changelog, as individuals as well, let us know. We'll do whatever we can. We definitely wanted to have you on the show to kind of talk about what it means to have design more baked into development and open source and lifting up. That's certainly what we appreciate here on the show and on our blog as well. I want to thank our sponsor, DigitalOcean, one more time for just showing us some love

and at the same time showing the community some love. A couple of things I want to mention is I definitely want to mention the hosting credit. So you can get a $10 hosting credit whenever you sign up. Use our coupon code, thechangelogoctober. Again, that's thechangelogoctober. One other cool thing they're doing to kind of help lift up the community is to pay you $50 to write tutorials and write articles for their community. It could be a tutorial on how to use your open source project. It doesn't even have to be something that

is for digital ocean or it can be something that is on digital ocean for example a couple examples that are already out there is how to install lamp stacks or how to install a lamp stack with wordpress on ubuntu or how to use i mentioned earlier in the show or i guess before the show how to use digital ocean's official ghost. If you haven't heard about this, go back to episode 105. We talked to Jonah Nolan about Ghost. It's a node-based open-source blogging platform. DigitalOcean has an official one-click application you can use.

That's pretty neat. And they also want to send stickers around the world. So it doesn't matter if you're in Vienna, U.S., Japan, wherever you're at. Email Barry at DigitalOcean and he'll ship out some stickers to you, DigitalOcean stickers to you. So one more thing for them is if you want to be a part of their team, they are hiring in New York City. So that's the NYC. Check out their open source – or sorry, their open position. They got open source in the brain.

Check out their open positions at digitalocean.com. But Justine, Sebastian, thanks again for coming on the show and for all that you're doing. We definitely want to support you however we can. To you, the listeners, and Andrew for rocking out this show. So let's say goodbye. See you all later. Bye. Bye-bye. this show so let's say goodbye see y'all later bye We'll see you next time.