The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Open source goes to Mars 🚀 (Interview)

Episode Date: May 14, 2021

This week we're talking about open source on Mars. Martin Woodward (Senior Director of Developer Relations at GitHub) joins us to talk about the new Mars badge GitHub introduced. This collaboration between GitHub and NASA confirmed nearly 12,000 people contributed code, documentation, graphic design, and more to the open source software that made Ingenuity’s launch possible. Today's show is a celebration of this human achievement and the impact of open source on space exploration as we know it.

This week on The Change Log, we're talking about open source on Mars. Martin Woodward, Senior Director of Developer Relations at GitHub, joins us to talk about the new Mars badge GitHub introduced. This collaboration between GitHub and NASA confirmed nearly 12,000 people contributed code, documentation, graphic design, and more to the open source software that made Ingenuity's launch possible. Today's show is a celebration of this human achievement and the impact of open source on space exploration as we know it.

Of course, big thanks to our partners Fastly, Linode, and LaunchDarkly. Our bandwidth is provided by Fastly. Learn more at Fastly.com. We love Linode. They keep it fast and simple. Check them out at Linode.com slash changelog. And get your feature flags powered by LaunchDarkly. Check them out at launchdarkly.com.

This episode of the changelog is brought to you by our friends at Influx Data and their upcoming Influx Days EMEA virtual event happening May 18th and 19th. If you've never been to an Influx Days, it's an event focused on the impact of time series data. Find out why time series databases are the fastest growing database segment providing real-time observability of your solutions. Get practical advice and insight from the engineers and developers behind InfluxDB, the leading time series database. Learn from real-world use cases and deep technology presentations from leading companies worldwide. Learn more and register for free at InfluxDays.com. Again, InfluxDays.com. so we're here with mark wilbert and mark you do a cool job at github leading a pretty interesting mission and recently i mean we had a space achievement happen powered by open source

in part at least not so much in total but in part and this is a big deal this mars mission badge the involvement with nasa and jpl can you kind of take us into what that's all about sure what's going on open source to make us go to mars building on the shoulders of giants as always as it always is yeah it's funny you sort of found out this news linux was running on the rover kind of thing and running on the helicopter. We sort of found that out. And I remember, I think it was end of February, some dev from Stripe tweeted Nat, my boss, to sort of say,

hey, you know, this is like the Martian code vault, isn't it? This is amazing. We've got Linux running on Mars. This is cool. And that was just, oh, that's such a good idea. That is cool. We reached out to some friends over at JPL. JPL have been a long time sort of users of GitHub, a long time contributor to open source as well. And we reached out to some friends over at JPL. JPL, you know, been a long time sort of users of GitHub,

a long time contributor to open source as well. And we reached out to some buddies over there and we're like, hey, what's running on that helicopter then? Is that something that we could do? You know, is that something we could talk about? And they were very kind. They provided us a list of open source dependencies the helicopter depended on, and we can dig into some of those if you want. And then created a badge that we sort of analyzed the projects

and then took the exact versions that Jpl would tell us that they were using and then analyzed those back and did a match if those people have the over counts and then if they do we stuck a badge on them and saying that well done your code made it to mars kind of thing you contributed to the fixes of the um ingenuity helicopter. And so, yeah, did that. And yeah, it's just over 12,000 people actually who got the badge. So it's pretty cool. Because that's like just over double how many people work at JPL as well.

It sort of shows you the power and all the developers that you can kind of work with and the size of your community when you do engage with open source and when you contribute back as well as when you're consuming open source. And yeah, it's cool. We couldn't have done it in large like you say large part without obviously the team of scientists uh jpl had a large amount to do with it as well and the american taxpayers thank you for that for funding it but uh yeah it's just awesome yeah that's why i said partly for

sure partly not in whole in total but partly for sure and you certainly couldn't come together on the time scales that came together without building on a bunch of, JBL called them like COTS products, but like off the shelf components and things, pulling those together and then pulling together open source components. It certainly couldn't have come together as quickly as it did as a technology demonstrator without building on open source. So that's a fantastic achievement. And we just wanted to share it with everybody and let people know. And it's funny, I was listening to an episode you had with dan you know from the curl project and we were working on

this at the time that episode got broadcast i'm not sure when you recorded it but anyway i saw that tweet i was like wow okay yeah yeah yeah he was trying to reach out to people at jpl to sort of see if the random people that always bother you when you're an open source maintainer asking you to fill out like random compliance documents and things he was asking those to right hey did my code make it to Mars? And this person's so far down the procurement chain, they don't know, you know. So yeah, we went and asked the people,

and yeah, it turns out it did. It made it to Mars, so that's pretty awesome. That's interesting. Now there's a process to discover that. Instead of being a maintainer wondering, it's more like GitHub helping to sort of pin back to GitHub accounts and repository commitments and whatnot. So I mean, that's interesting.

I didn't consider really that this would be a Mars code vault as well. We talked with John Evans, Jared did at least, talking about GitHub's Arctic code vault, which is an interesting topic in itself, just to preserve the long-term future of our source code, because it's really that important to leave the planet, escape velocity and all that, to get to another planet and fly a helicopter, which is a massive human achievement to do. How does that play out though? Is that really a code vault or is it just sort of just named that to some degree? Is it, is it really that way?

Yeah, we didn't name it that. We named it the Mars 2020 like mission contributor or something like that. Because unlike the Arctic code vault where they've actually like archived the actual source code storage and stuck it in the Arctic. Yeah, exactly. In Mars, they were under very, very, very strict weight limits to the grams right and so every kilobyte counts yeah every kilobyte plus the helicopter is not the best place to put your code vault you know on a helicopter so yeah so it's all compiled code that's what i figured and in fact the the

ingenuity helicopter itself is basically there's a bunch of papers on it that you can go read but it's kind of basically two arduinos and a raspberry pi zero like that level of technology is what powers the helicopter what and the reason why there's two so it's two microcontrollers they act as flight controllers arm based and then a larger sort of qualcomm powered board which is where linux is running embedded linux it's a 3.4 kernel, Lanero-based distribution, 3.4 kernel. And these, again, on off-the-shelf Qualcomm kind of dev board for building drones and things, and they grabbed that, and it was running Lanero 3.4, like a distribution of Linux on there.

I'm like, okay, that'll do. It's got all the IO I need. It's got working cameras, because we all know how fun cameras and audio can be to get running on Linux at times. But yeah, working camera drivers, working everything. Let's go, let's use this. all know how fun cameras and audio can be to get running on right on linux at times but yeah working camera drivers working everything let's go let's use this yeah i took those and that's what we ran with once we got the dependencies all compiled down though so we asked the jpr team which open source dependencies have contributed to the success so we don't have access to their code

or anything like that they told us the dependencies and then we did the analysis from those but they included things for them that were essential for the mars mission they're actually part of the flight software like bootstrap and stuff i'm guessing bootstrap isn't running on the helicopter right i'm guessing that that's part of the flight control systems where they're running that and things and some of the python analysis stuff is definitely happening locally there is python running on mars for sure but not so much in the helicopter but yeah so not exactly on mars in terms of the Mars mission badge, it's more like involved in getting us to Mars as part of this mission, to be super clear.

Yeah, and getting the data back, analyzing that data as well. From the helicopter, we limited as well to the helicopter mission in particular because there are actually three, I think three Lennox boxes that I know of on Mars. The helicopter itself, then there's the radio system, the Linux boxes that I know of on Mars. The helicopter itself. Then there's the radio system, the control board that it talks to on the rover.

And then there's another Linux box that we're not actually including because it's currently not being used as part of the Ingenuity mission. You know, when you saw the rover landing, you saw those amazing like videos of the parachute and you saw, you know, the parachute, and you saw the videos as it's coming down, all that sort of stuff. That's actually running on a Linux. It's a ruggedized PC that's powering that one, because it, again, had a bunch of USB cameras plugged into it, because it was all working and they could get it going. And so because it wasn't mission critical, they could run it on what they call a Class D system, like Ingenuity. So it's a lower risk

experimental. If it didn a lower-risk experimental. If it didn't work, they just didn't get video of a sky crane flying away and all that sort of stuff, but it wasn't the end of the world. But that's running a 415 kernel, I think, and that's actually got Python on and FFmpeg and all those cool things because it took the video and it did the compressing on board the little PC before sending it over to the rover. So I'm a bit of a space nerd, as you probably tell. I it yeah keep going yeah yeah yeah this is we can talk about the open source

but so i did my degree in physics which is why it's an astronomy and all that sort of stuff so kind of this is my background but anyway it did all the compression on the organized pc and sent it over and then this sent it back because the rover itself's like uh it's radiation hardened like power pc is what the rover runs and so it's like a 1990s era Mac kind of thing is what it's basically running on. But it takes a lot of power because it's like a big radiation hardened processor. So the helicopter is the most powerful computer on Mars, like 100 times. The rover itself is 100 times slower than the helicopter in terms of processing. But it's 10 times faster than the previous rovers.

You see progress going along, but yeah, it's good stuff. And that's running two Arduinos and a Raspberry Pi Zero? Equivalent. It's actually a Qualcomm chip, not a Broadcom chip. So yeah, but it's a Qualcomm chip that runs on the helicopter, and that runs as a navigation computer. Because over here on Earth, drones navigate using GPS and all that sort of stuff but yeah ain't got no gps on mars so the way it navigates is using shore reckoning so you know

looking at dead reckoning basically how far are we moving you know using a gyroscope that's built into this same board this drone board and it has a black and white camera that looks down and the black and white camera takes i think it's a number of frames per second i can't remember it's like 50 frames per second or whatever 500 i can't remember it takes a bunch the black and white camera takes, I think it's a number of frames per second. I can't remember. It's like 50 frames per second or whatever, 500. I can't remember. It takes a bunch of black and white photos looking down and then it looks at surface features and then it maps the tracking of surface features and uses that to basically dead reckon where it is on the surface. That's why the navigation computer needs to be powerful because it's taking all those images looking down. it's handling all the processing from all the io and then it talks to the microcontrollers so there are two microcontrollers

and it talks to them to say move me up move me forward where it wants to go move me down and those flight control computers are the things that are actually keeping it in the air because they need their real time so they need to work so fast and respond to things so that's kind of how all that works and the reason there's two of them is in case one of them argues with the other because again none of this is radiation hardwood and stuff it's just literally you've got a block of batteries and then all four sides of pcbs very lightweight like really small pcbs around the batteries and then it's a heater and then you've got the motors and the propeller and things it's mostly batteries from what i've seen so yeah but those microcontrollers if they disagree with each other they reboot they switch it off and on again in midair

pretty fast and so that's how they handle i don't know if it's actually rebooted or not but that was the plan as far as i could read from looking at these papers wow it's cool it was a cool mission it was amazing it was amazing achievement and the remember the black hot the photo of the black hole that the event horizon yeah the event horizon. And remember the photo of the black hole that the Event Horizon telescope team took a picture of this black hole? Did you do a show about that? I can't remember. I can't remember either.

We talked about it. I'm not sure. I think it might have been mentioned. I recall talking about it somehow, some way on a show. We do have our transcript open source on GitHub, so we can grab those to see what's in there for that. We can confirm that a little bit easier than Daniel could confirm his code running on Mars you know good yeah that's

right yeah there we are so yeah it's similar to that with the event horizon telescope we looked who was all involved in helping the team pull together this image of a black hole it's a massive distributed team and they were doing it all they were doing all that work on Caleb as well. It ended up being like 21,500 people, roughly, had contributed to all the... It was all Python and all SciPy and NumPy and all this sort of stuff. And it was, yeah, over 20,000 people had ended up contributing to this project. And back then, we didn't have this notion of the badges, otherwise we could have done.

So when we were doing the Mars stuff, we were thinking, oh, this is cool, we've got to do something here. So we decided to do a badge. And then we made it an achievements because we wanted it to be a nice colorful badge rather than the old black and white badges we used to have. Is this badging thing new? I mean, GitHub was social coding.

That was what it came out as. And a lot of the social sites, like achievements, badges, is kind of a thing that they do. I remember CoderWall back in the day was kind of like a badging sister site to GitHub in a sense, not related in terms of the people operating it, but it was kind of like they would link

back and forth to each other. But, you know, Stack Overflow, Dev Platform, a lot of these social sites, like badges, badges, win stuff, achievements, and that's supposed to encourage use. But I don't remember GitHub really having anything like that until recently. We had highlights, so the Arctic

Code Vault was a highlight and if you're a sponsor as well, that was a highlight before but we didn't have anything that was quite as big or prominent so with the Mars achievement, with the Mars highlight, we did the initial designs and the black and white sort of helicopter

things looked a bit boring and then the designer did this amazing color version and we were like, version oh that's so cool we've got to use that and so we kind of well let's do an achievement section and we'll bring that in very mindful of though is we don't want to like this is obviously you for this we added in the arctic cobalt we sort of backdated it as an achievement now rather than a similar sponsors so you get a nice colorful batch but what we don't there you're being rewarded for things that you've done like what we want to be careful of is going too far down the gamification front because you know we don't want to encourage burnout with open source maintenance like a streak badge would be counterproductive yeah exactly yeah no and then

anyway we've got the legendary kind of the green graph of commits kind of thing that's good enough as a streak badge encouragement for the new people whereas you more experienced you get quite proud of seeing the gaps in there and the fact that i'm always you know and you see oh yeah look i took a proper vacation i can prove it to my family i actually didn't log into it right weekend so i saw somebody recently who is uh somebody who's more deep in the code, became a founder and then CEO. And you can see their GitHub graph. They shared this on Twitter recently, where when they were CEO and founder,

well, I guess more CEO, and this is no knock against CEOs, by any means, it's just this person's history, where you can see their graph essentially being more white and less green, which is how it works. As they became this new founder, stepping away from their CEO role

into this new founder role, where they're sort of coding more and exploring more, you can see that the green come back, essentially. Like, this is my journey from CEO to founder, for example. And you see that. It's a journey.

It's informant. Did you hear about the Skyline project? Have you heard about that one that we did as well? Mm-mm. Oh, wow. We did this project. If you go to skyline.github.com,

it was a thing we did just in the new year where we kind of i did see this had a bit of fun with the commit graph kind of one of these in-house look at isn't this fun kind of thing we did it because we were shipping contribution graphs to sort of some of the you know some of the top maintainers some of the people who've just done amazing work over the year like dan for example we sent them a steel contribution graph we 3d printed in steel oh i did see a few of those coming up on twitter people were sharing a version of a contribution graph and we sent it to them but we wanted a link for them to go to to be able to kind of share it with their friends because it's quite hard to share a picture so we built this site originally it was some dodgy pm code that then like got made pretty by our awesome team yeah it shipped that and it's cool and you can sort of

zoom around in it if you've got an oculus you can go in and you know go in around it in 3d and things so that's cool but it's what i like about that is that we're actually encouraging like it looks better if there is variance you know like the most valuable real estate like manhattan has is the most valuable real estate in manhattan is the stuff around a gap around central park or whatever and it's the same with it should be the same with contribution it looks better when there's variance it looks better if there isn't too much stuff at the weekend if there is some gaps and you've got the peaks and then you can like think oh yeah i remember that that was when i was coming to this release of my library or whatever or that was when i was coming up to this particular demo or

go live or whatever it was and you can look at those highlights and kind of oh yeah i remember those but also look at the gaps for yes that was that was an amazing vacation what a great thanksgiving that right it's good stuff so is this the kind of projects that you head up as the executive director oh yeah sorry i'm reading the wrong thing you're up as the executive director? Sorry, I'm reading the wrong thing. You were the executive director of the.NET Foundation, but you're senior director of DevRel. Is this like the Skyline project, this thing? Is this like what DevRel is all about, or is there other things that are tangential

to these kind of cool... Yeah, what is DevRel exactly? DevRel-y. I like that. Yeah, so it's different, again, from what it is in quite a lot of places, because quite a lot of places, if you're doing DevRel, exactly. DevRel-y, I like that. Yeah, so it's different, again, from what it is in quite a lot of places because quite a lot of places, if you're doing DevRel, you're trying to raise awareness of your product

amongst developers and... That's like your GitHub. ...help people use it. Exactly what your GitHub is. It's a different problem. So what we try to do, what my teams do, it's a small team, and we're just basically trying to help open-source maintainers.

We spend a lot of our time talking to open source maintainers and also just regular developers and helping them get the most out of GitHub and trying to see what we can do to help them be successful. So in some ways as well, it's like a traditional DevRel because you're going out, you're talking to people all the time, you're talking to developers, you're helping them use stuff. Hey, did you know you could go, you do do this and that'll save you a bunch of time when you can you know do all that something so you can say help people and then you can also bring that feedback back into the engineering team as well because we kind of sit on the engineering team so we come in and we sort of say hey you know this pull request thing like it would be great if you could do auto

merge or sponsors it'd be great if x y if you could do one-time payments in sponsors. Like we're hearing this around and we're just an extra data point then for the people who are building the features and they can help make the product better over time, hopefully. And it's trying to have these connections between, because GitHub's great and it's amazing it's scaled. But for a lot of people, a lot of people don't really think of GitHub as a thing. GitHub is just GitHub. It's just there.

It's like water. And because, again, because of the sort of large scale that GitHub's working at, sometimes with our, like the maintainers who are running massive projects, they wouldn't know anybody at GitHub they could go talk to to go help them with a problem. And that's bad.

Like these people are incredibly busy. And, you know, so i want to kind of try and help put the human face in make sure the team are out there putting the human face in front of the company and so when a maintainer has an issue or a problem and they're having trouble you know we've got full-on support and everything else and that's what we should all use all the time but um also i want them to know that they know people at github if they need to help or if they want to give some feedback or something so what's the best way for a maintainer to get your attention? They can, personally, as I say,

at martinwoodwood on Twitter or just martinwoodwood at github.com on email if you want to drop me a line. Very happy for people to reach out, and they do. Probably easier than if you're at Nat Friedman. That also works, but it's generally better not to go straight to Nat. He does get a lot of tweets sent to him him and he tends to forward them along to me so yep just hit me up

anyway anyway that way or you know as i say yeah there are community support the community forums are all great places that's where we tend to hang out as well a lot of the times if you need particular attention feel free just to reach out for sure yeah speaking of that i saw a recent twitter exchange between max lynch talking about when you view a file in the history being able to actually see that file at the exact point in the history yeah and he just said number one feature i want to see on github and he at github on twitter and then the very end cc at nat freeman and then like three days later nat responds new button below and then boom you can kind of see that this is being driven in the wild. So person on Twitter, dating their best request.

He's the CEO founder of Iconic Frameworks. So somebody out there in open source, a maintainer, of course, but getting the attention of Nat and making Nat possible pretty quickly. Yeah, that one actually, it's one of those ones where it kind of had kind of been in the hopper for a week or two but yeah yeah it was okay it wasn't like a three-day hey let's do this now because max says it is yeah well let's let's max think that but yeah no okay gotcha it might have even been a feature already wasn't it i mean i feel like i've done that view file no you could view the problem and it was driving me mad for ages because i was one of the ones that put it on the backlog actually okay you could go in and you could browse the history at that point in the

commit so you hit browse history in a web ui of a file it would show you where that file had changed but then all you could do was browse to the repository at that point in time and then you had to go navigate back to the file and find it it was infuriated so yeah um somebody called carl delgo added a button which takes you straight to that file at that point in history which is like why did we never have that it's you know that's yeah that's exactly what you wanted is the ux anyway but there's a lot of these like little small things that you can do that really help improve the quality of life of everybody and that's one of the things i enjoy the most is just like going out listening and chatting to people oh, if we just did this tiny little thing over here.

Like, what did we do the other day? It was just simple. It was, you know, on a pull request or when you're assigning it. Like if you're assigning a pull request, your name's at the top now and it's there before you like, well, duh, of course it is. But again, there's little things like that that just speed things up rather than just typing your name in every time and having to find it. Let's just put your name on top. Using code inside of a pull request. If you want to include some code in a code snippet inside of the title of the pull request or you want to improve markdown.

And it's just all these little things. So while we're building the big features, while we're building things like GitHub code spaces, or while we're building the next version of actions and improving actions and all that sort of good stuff we want to do those but we can't forget the paper cuts we quite often call them you know like just general quality of life improvements how can we make the platform faster how can we make it better for everybody to use how can we improve maintainers lives because again these people are just doing awesome stuff the genuinely like most maintainers lives because again these people are just doing awesome stuff the genuinely like most maintainers are the nicest people you'll ever meet in the world as you know because you talk to them all the time like they're just lovely people yeah you know you get people who volunteer you get the

people who like stand up in the community and volunteer and go do stuff and then you get the people who take anything they just give they just give all the time sometimes too much more than they've got it's just trying to do what you can to help these people help them like be able to do things fast to help them be able to spend more time with fingers on keyboards and less time taking care of stuff they don't really want to worry about so at the place of value that's the job it's best job in the world because you just get to have fun you get to talk to people you get to go build stuff you get to help people you know use things and then you get to go talk to jpl occasionally and do fancy mars badges and nerd out over like the hardware that's running in space and it's awesome

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If you can write it in JavaScript and an API, you can build it in Retool. Try Retool out for yourself at retool.com slash changelog. Again, retool.com slash changelog. So the timing of this whole thing was really funny for us. Like you said, we had that episode with Daniel Stenberg of Curl, and we were speculating about whether or not I was on Mars. And Adam and I were both pretty sure, like, hey, you're on Mars. We just got to get some confirmation.

Daniel probably thought he was as well. And of course, I think it was just days later that this whole announcement came out, and maybe days later after the episode came out. So we had a lot of listeners who had just listened to that conversation and then here it was was really cool and daniel had this great chart i'm not sure if you saw the chart he put out where he's like number of planets that curl runs on and it's like all this years where it's just one it's a flat line up until this year and it's like two and it's like it just launches up to two so i mean he was just tickled to have that confirmation and i'm sure there's many other people, like you said, around 12,000 that got the badge

also probably tickled to find out, hey, you know, you've contributed to this awesome mission. So you want to tell us, in addition to Curl, and you mentioned Python generally, some of the other projects that are involved in ingenuity. Yeah, on that graph, I saw another one of those graphs, by the way, which was planets with the highest ratio

of working audio drivers in Linux. And like Mars is at 100 percent. So, yeah, there is that. That's a good one, too. I like that one. That's good. Yeah, I mean, so there's a bunch of like, you know, in the scientific community, Python is massively big. So obviously in a lot of the analysis of the data that comes back, that's a lot of Python.

That's a lot of like SciPy and NumPy and all those sorts of projects that allow you to do big data analysis, as well as things, some of the charting like Matplotlib. I saw the maintainer of Matplotlib saw a Matplotlib graph on screen that proved the helicopter had taken off.

That was really weird, was watching mission control during the analysis of the off. That was really weird, was watching mission control during the analysis of the data as it was inbound because you sort of see them bringing up GitHub, which everyone's at GitHub, it's like, ah, this is amazing. And then, yeah, you see people using, like executing Python commands, executing charts,

and then somebody stuck the altitude data into Matplotlib and then brings up this graph on screen of going up to three meters and then back down again kind of thing so that was really cool it was just great to see kind of the recognition you know we as well as the stuff for doing the data analysis and the data transfer obviously curl used in data transfer between devices and all that sort of stuff there's also all the things on the analysis side which is where a lot of that Python code runs. And then just in rendering of that stuff and doing what they call the flight control system.

So that's where you've got a website. Everybody needs a website to be able to show data internally and all this. So that's where you've got kind of Bootstrap and Elasticsearch and some of those sorts of applications. But yeah, it's great. And then another project that's used very, very heavily, so that's on the Python side. A lot of that python while there is python running on on mars so we're told the vast majority of like the python stuff that we mentioned in the helicopter projects running

planet side earth side but f prime is a project that nasa have open github and that's a seed project it's a framework for building flight control systems that's used in the helicopter, but it's also used in like CubeSats. That's primarily where it had come from, was like a CubeSat system. And it's a framework that they open source. So the entire code base of that helicopter,

you can't go send a pull request to make the helicopter do donuts or something, you know, sadly. That's too bad, yeah. Yeah, too bad, yeah. But the entire flight control system for that actual instance of f prime that's running isn't all available some of its jpl proprietary you know it's not publicly available but the f prime framework that they use to build that flight control system is and you can take that f prime framework and the people over at um oh i'm trying to remember the name of the company

oh it's just blank my name. It's where they bought the laser altimeter from. And I'm blanking. It's a shop I've been to many times to spend ridiculous amounts of money on random bits of Raspberry Pi hardware. You can take the F Prime project and run it on a Raspberry Pi locally. You can take it and run it in different systems locally and have it running and build your own simulated environments or use real hardware and we're seeing like there's this massive boom of kind of space tech you know as access into space is getting cheaper and we're starting to see a bunch of these startups getting

into space technology now and so while the mars mission is like the first mission where consumer grade electronics hardware has kind of made it onto the surface of another planet and it's proving itself. Consumer-grade electronics hardware has been running for a long time in orbit and it's been working fine. And so you're sort of seeing more and more of those sorts of things. So I think there's a lot more open source in space

than we probably know and that we probably, you know, even we're aware of. And there'll be more and more as we get, you know, more and more CubeSats and more and more access into space. So it's cool. Open source has not just won this planet, it's winning the universe.

Yeah. Right. I was even thinking, even in our local atmosphere, with a lot of the military-grade drones and stuff, there's a lot of open sources that have penetrated the drone market like crazy as well. So all over the place. What they used was this Qualcomm demo board which is basically was a

board for building drone hardware and it's a very lightweight like sort of credit card size two-sided pcb and that was the base of this of their platform so that was all sort of drone hardware but the helicopter it's a counter rotational thing because of they couldn't do like a quadcopter or something like that because their propellers need to be so big to run in the atmosphere. And there's only a certain amount of room that they could take under the rover's belly. So that's why they ended up with that design. Is that what differentiates a helicopter from a drone is the quad, the four? I don't know.

I don't think there is actually. Yeah. Because people overuse that word. Yeah, like from my reading, drones is kind of one of these words like hackers that really people don't often use in the real world kind of thing of these words like hackers that really people don't often use in the real world kind of thing yeah the people in the field don't tend to use it as much it tends to be people outside the field talking about it because drone can be anything that's autonomous and sort of self-managing kind of like is the rover a drone but um i think people when

these would like when my when my seventh year old father talks about drones he's talking about one of those quadcopter or a exocopter thing that right might not even be autonomous might be flown by radio control but they think of it as a drone even though it's been yeah stick controlled the blue correct term is unmanned aerial vehicle uav there we go you gotta say unmanned yeah aerial vehicle unmanned aerial vehicle okay yeah but people call drones like that and that's the uavs that's and that's like the military grade and all that sort of stuff but people call like dji kind of thing they call that you know that's a drone themselves not like just people like the the company even calls it that right yeah exactly but that's not a like it doesn't run in autonomous

mode all that time it's like kind of like a fly-by-wire yeah totally i think they're starting to have they're starting to have some, they can fly themselves sometimes. There's modes, but it's controlled by a remote generally. But if you've ever tried to fly one of those without the computer helping you, I built one once and tried to fly it myself and it didn't stay in one piece for very, very long. So the computer's doing a lot to help you.

So I guess it's fly-by-wire, like a plane. In regards to daniel on this two planets thing and low earth orbit and drones and where code might be i responded back i said hey i know curls on mars not because of this confirmation but i would like to also think it's probably on the iss or in low earth orbit with other space things i mean there's more hope and then we also have the artemis mission happening soon which is this mission to back to the moon yeah i gotta consider like how you know with badges and this achievements thing how will github continue to track open source not on the planet essentially low earth orbit iss the moon mars yeah i think the artemis one's great so if you hadn't read that

that's nasa mission to the moon yeah and that's really interesting because it's so much closer. And so you've only got like eight minutes delay rather than hours delay of communication. And, you know, modern, you can build on a bunch of this. It's already confirmed it's going to use some of the same lessons that we've learned from this robot. So that's fantastic. In terms of how GitLab are tracking it,

like we can do like one-offs to this sort of thing because it's just cool. And we celebrate this amazing achievement of powered flight on another planet which is awesome it doesn't scale once that becomes common and you know once that becomes every day so what we're trying to do is help people see their dependencies and then what i'd love to do is do some stuff that help, like, gave more visibility to maintainers about, like, where their stuff was being used or how much it was being used. You throw something out into the world and then, like, six years later, somebody sends you a pull request and then you learn that actually they've been taking a critical dependency on this for their entire lives as far as they're concerned. You didn't know anybody but you was using this particular bit of code like i think we've all had that kind of experience so it'd be very very cool to kind of get some feedback loops going on there in terms of people using it and when you've got things like actions coming into play as well you can see the potential there would be amazing if you could kind

of say oh hey people who are dependent on my release let's go try the new release and see if it breaks your code that sort of stuff so, there's lots of opportunities I think in the future. That would be cool for sure. Yeah. We should see the planet. Like you're talking about co-running like international space station. There's a thing called Astro Pi. There are a couple of Raspberry Pis running on the international space station

from ESA and kids can like send up code to run on a Raspberry Pi in, in your nearer orbit in, in the international space station. So that's neat. So yeah. So Raspberry Pis in space so curl is almost a hundred percent multiple copies of curl running on the space station i was speculating more with him again because he's like you know just planets and i'm like great achievement of course knocking this slide that jared had mentioned from daniel but more like it's probably more than just you think i mean we've heard about i believe china

landing on an asteroid i think i pay attention to some space science news. I think there's an asteroid landing to some degree. So I can imagine that you can't confirm that. But speculation is interesting because it's a source of motivation. As you said, the feedback loop. Yeah. I think that we all do things in this world sometimes. And we're generous and we put it out there.

And sometimes, as you said before, beyond what we're capable of doing. But it's that feedback loop and it's that motivation. Because i think of it like when you ask a child in school or whatever like hey what do you want to be when you grow up fireman police officer doctor veterinarian astronaut right we might not all make it to astronaut status but our code might yeah yeah it's amazing but i just like just anyone using your stuff there's two things that kind of motivate you, isn't there? When you're creating things, there's this a what it does. So you create a bit of code and then you run it and you're like, wow, this is cool. And you keep clicking the button 10 times because you're just impressed that it even works at all.

But then you also have the seeing other people using your code, like 65 million people using GitHub every day. You kind of get used to that. We were all giggling like schoolchildren when we see them using it during the nasa like mission control that's github that's like that's the button that i did you know and it's just amazing seeing people use your stuff and so the more we can help people know when their stuff is being used then hopefully there is that reward of hey yeah isn't this cool you being used. And then what we also need to do, of course, is help companies especially be more cognizant of the open source dependencies that they've got and then think about that and try and help them make sure

that they're supporting some of their open source dependencies. That's what you've spoken to Devin about, sponsors and things. That's where some of the motivation for that comes from, but also showing dependency trees. So you can think what open source have I got a critical dependency on? What am I doing to help make this sustainable in the future? How can I contribute back there? And the minute we're kind of leaving money on the table that we could be

helping people to do more work on the projects that they love. So yeah. So we're trying to do that as well. I also see like the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi you work on the projects that they love. So yeah, so we're trying to do that as well. I also see like the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi you mentioned on the International Space Station that the ingenuity was powered by these microcontrollers. Like that's something that I can go buy today. Yeah. It's kind of representation ways.

Like if you want to be able to influence not only just this world, but humanity's possibility of exploration of space, well, you can go and buy a Raspberry Pi today. You can play on the same kind of hardware, for example. And you can advance the state of the art as well. You can figure out how to do inertial navigation. You can do these machine learning applications that are looking for surface features and then showing which direction they're moving in

and all that sort of stuff. You can advance the state of the art, which then other people can use to go build other stuff and what's great is that it's not like competition either you look at the countries that were contributing to f prime and all the projects that were got the mars badge like nearly half of the contributors were in based in the us that contributed to those projects but a huge chunk of contributions to those libraries didn't come from the united states and whereas previously these sorts of missions would be kind of like national, rah, rah, aren't we amazing? What can we do? Kind of thing. It becomes a lot more about the science

and a lot more about what humanity can do together, which is what the scientists have always wanted. Sometimes the politicians get in the way, but it's just amazing when you see the scale of international collaboration, international cooperation that happens. None of it, so we could could put a helicopter on mars it was done to solve problems and everybody come together and then it was by doing that and by sharing the goodness that we've got out there and by the generosity of people by saying you know you might find this useful then somebody from jpl can come along go oh that's a cool building block that's a cool bit of lego you know stick them together and build a helicopter land on another planet and take it for some flights so yeah it's just tremendous yep you gotta love just being part of that community as well and the people that got the badge is awesome

and seeing the reactions from a lot of these people like they're like i don't want to be that's cool but what's also cool is seeing the reactions of people. I've got teenage kids. I've seen the reactions of those and I'm like, wait, did you have something to do with that? Like Mars mission? Not really.

Like I didn't. None of my code made it to Mars, but I talked to somebody whose code was there. I know somebody who knows somebody. Yeah, exactly.

I know somebody. Now I'm cool. But now I'm also like getting into software development, getting into open source is cool and like, oh yeah, I see

where this is going. So having these moments is great for us as a community as well to kind of celebrate. Look at what we're doing. This is amazing. This is celebrating a win. Yeah. This is celebrating a win, which I'm a huge fan of. And Jared knows this.

I think too often, not so much we don't celebrate the wins, but we don't give them enough attention. And, you know, we talked about the gamification and sort of hedging that to some degree. And I don't think that's what you're doing here at all. And I'm glad you asked that question, Jerry, because we don't want GitHub to become a game. It may be behind the scenes if you make it that to win open source or to become an awesome maintainer or whatever it might be that you want to achieve. But too often do we just not celebrate the wins and take the time for that. I think that's what that is. And you've got, what, nearly 12,000 people that contributed code to this. That's a lot of people involved in open source.

And that's a big win for them. And it's a big win for, I suppose, open source at large. Yeah, because we recognized everybody in that project who commits up to the period where JPL said, this is the commit that we use. You know, this is the version that we used. And so I saw some people who were like, well, all I did was fix a one line change in a readme or a doc or something like that. And now I've got the badge. That's awesome. That's cool. You helped. You helped make this project be a success, no matter how small you might think your contribution was. That line in the documentation you might have fixed might have been the line that helped the team at JPL understand how to

use this particular library and help make it more accessible to them. It's just cool. And so let's celebrate the wins. Let's try not to be too much, you know, you see a few comments about their code not making it and it's like, whatever. So you've got to celebrate the wins and just be successful. Well, I was excited about Arctic Code Vault

as an achievement for me. And I got to say, I've fixed a lot of readmes and I went to my profile, very excited and no mars badge for me so i was pretty bummed oh man i'm sorry if it helps i didn't have a mars badge either i'm joking of course you can guarantee that was the first thing i did when i got access to the query results am i in it no damn it what's the point of doing all this work i didn't expect the arctic code vault either i just really not everybody gets that one so i was like like, yeah. That one's a little easier to get. You had to have your code in by a

certain date and make sure you could uncheck it. You could opt it out of the Arctic Cobalt if you wanted. But yeah, it does worry me because most of the time it seems to be trying to delete my code out of code bases nowadays. I think I've got one change that's in GitHub, which is to help Gradle do something super small. It was a tiny,

tiny, tiny thing. Now we are where we are. So that's great's great so we used to do this badge a changelog badge and we would give it to you on your readme where it'd be like your episode number and it's just a nice way to link to your episode and so i used to open pull requests on a lot of repos a lot of popular repos because they'd come on the show and we'd do it for you so it was the easy button and so i got a lot of merges onto you know pretty prominent but just like i'm like literally just adding the changelog badge i'm not improving anything or even fixing a typo and so i thought well there's an outside chance that i've put a badge on one of these and so i actually had high expectations to be on mars and i got to my profile nope i'm not on there like ah so close, you need to have more Python people on, clearly.

If we're going to do more of these things, that seems to be where the cool kids are at. Or curl. Like, you've got a curl one now. We're good. Curls everywhere. Curls in there. One of my favorite things I like to do is,

you probably do the same. Well, you probably did, Dave, is go to the license on things you're using and go see how many people you know in that list. Like, let's see how many of my friends I can find in this particular third-party usages, file whatever daniel's always up there you know he has his email address in his third-party usages yes mad we talked about that which you probably know we cover some of those things where he got random emails because of his email being

out there so much in the license and whatnot oh he had the one about somebody thought he'd hacked him or something like that. Yeah, an Instagram hack. Again, he's so nice. He actually answers people. He actually replies back to them. You find this across the board. Most of the maintainers you talk to are just such lovely humans and just take time and are nice. And especially ones that have got large communities around them.

Because the reason they have a community is because they've been so nice, so inclusive and so welcoming to people. And they just can't help themselves even when it's emails that are obviously from confused people so yeah This episode is brought to you by our friends at O'Reilly. Many of you know O'Reilly for their animal tech books and their conferences, but you may not know they have an online learning platform as well. The platform has all their books, all their videos, and all their conference talks. Plus, you can learn by doing with live online training courses and virtual conferences, certification practice exams, and interactive sandboxes and scenarios to practice coding alongside what you're learning. They cover a ton of technology topics, machine learning, AI, programming languages, DevOps, data science, cloud, containers, security, and even soft skills like business management and presentation skills. You name it, it is all in there. If you need to keep your team or yourself up to speed on their tech skills, then check out O'Reilly's online

learning platform. Learn more and keep your team skills sharp at O'Reilly.com slash changelog. Again, O'Reilly.com. So Marty, you mentioned that you got some education behind you. Physicist is what I understand. And so you're in a good place to be, I suppose, in DevRel with GitHub and all this fun stuff happening around science and space and whatnot. What other fun things are happening? I mean, as a physicist or someone who studied it, kind of give me an understanding of what your education was and then how that dovetails into some of the, I guess, things you get to tinker with or play with or communities to sort of encourage in their open source journeys? Yeah, sure. So I did my undergrad in physics. So I was always doing a bunch of sort of astronomy and a bunch of that research. So originally I was like playing with Hubble Space Telescope data

and doing data analysis of that. And that was back in the days where to even having a TCP stack wasn't guaranteed and using, trying to do a bunch of that sort of stuff back then involved getting DVDs sent over and paying for them with Hubble Space Data on them and putting them in the one computer in the lab that has a SCSI interface so you could actually load that data up and do some analysis, write some code. It was very hard to share that code. And that's why astronomers and physicists and physicists and you know all the scientific

community have been kind of quick to latch on to open source and always been sharing a bunch of their code that's obviously where a lot of the internet infrastructure came along as well especially if it was from a lot of those networks of sharing those things so we did that and then me personally went from doing kind of doing some of that sort of stuff to i had like real jobs for a while i had like a working in banks and insurance companies and all the good stuff that you do. But when I was doing those jobs, I was always involved in open source on the side to scratch that itch that everybody has that you're trying to do, whether that be using a different language or using a different thing.

And so that's what we do. And so I was doing some open source, ended up getting together with a few friends who were also interested in the same project. And we ended up building a company around it. It's a company called Team Price, but it was a super small, like five person company. But we started on open source, working together, did a commercial application.

And then we ended up selling that to Microsoft, actually, funnily enough, about like 10 years ago. So we got acquired as this little five person startup coming in. We figured I would last a couple of years, just do my time and then move on because I was coming from this Java, Eclipse-y, kind of open-source-y world. And I didn't, you know, back then, it wasn't really kind of the thing it is now. And so, yeah, and then I was around, helped kind of change, you know,

you've interviewed a cast of characters on that side of things in the past, so don't need to dig into that news. But, you know, worked on that team change microsoft and kind of change how we how they approached open source brought git into the company and then i created i was the one that created microsoft's github account there you go there's my claim to fame so yeah i was running on my credit card for a little while yeah and then did the open source stuff and then moved over so and then and then came to github like february last year so that was a great move and now i'm just i feel like I'm home

because everybody cares about the same things I care about. You know, we're all remote. It's fantastic. So I love it over here. But in terms of like what's new, there's a lot of stuff going on in the science space. I mentioned like a lot of these space tech startups, but even what we're seeing is the more established players

like NASA and people like that and ESA, and they're finding ways to use open source technology and to use more rapid technology and integrate them as part of missions so that's what you saw with Ingenuity was part of the main Perseverance mission and NASA have these like levels of the risk that they like class A class B C D and the rover itself is a class B mission in terms of like how important it is in terms of scientific results and all that sort of stuff and so that's a very very high level of compliance they do to manage that risk but instruments on it like the helicopter is classed

as kind of an instrument that's attached to the rover they can be of different risk categories because if they fail so what as long as it doesn't hit the rover then the helicopter you know they haven't lost anything they've tried it you know it failed it's fine whatever we didn't lose anything so as long as it doesn't affect the main mission then they've got a little bit more risk a bit more to play with so that's why the helicopter can happen that's why the things like the dvr box you know the thing that the linux box that recorded the video landing that's why those things can happen. But then you also get them doing stuff like, there's a James Webb telescope that's coming up,

which is kind of a successor to Hubble. So back when I, before I started my career, back when I was doing analysis on Hubble data, this new James Webb telescope's going to be launching soon. And that's a massive, massive investment from NASA and set to be like Hubble. Hubble's revolutionized astrophysics you know massive massive investment from nasa and you know set to be like hubble hubble's revolutionized astrophysics and revolutionized so many areas of humanity's knowledge and the james webb telescope set to do the same thing and it's got a bunch of technologies to keep things

cold and the platform itself is very class a you know what i mean it's like super like they're making sure everything works and they don't particularly want to send astronauts to go fix mirrors and things like they had previously but on the ground the innovation never stops you know you send hardware you send a platform up in space and you can get data from it but just like when you're collecting data from iot devices or from little i've got little raspberry pie sat on my windowsill here collecting data about like plant because i'm trying to grow some basil and i fail so i'm sciencing that and i've stuck a raspberry pi on it because now i'm bound to grow basil exactly with alex yeah i was paying attention to that little grow lab thing i was like i should try that because i love tinkering so just like that you can innovate you can keep

innovating on the data and the analysis data and so with the james webb telescope you know it's this big important massive mission with like billions of dollars being invested into it on the ground all that analysis and all just like with the event horizon telescope all the analysis done using python using lots of you know machine learning using lots of new like different data techniques and things and it helps really kind of innovate and extend the life of these missions way past what people originally thought. And the scientific community in open source has got so much in common because with open source, code is what matters. Talk is easy in open source, as we all know, everyone can talk. But if you show up and you regularly show up and you bring

code and you help all the time, then that's when people value what you're saying, what you're doing. In the scientific community, this whole notion of peer review and the whole notion of showing your workings is what's important. And so open source is amazing for that because you can show exactly how we analyze this data. You can give the code to the people so they can run exactly these experiments again, take the data, run their analysis through it, look for issues you know make sure you haven't made mistakes and repeat things so we see more and more scientific papers actually linking to github repos which is just super cool so um yeah and so i love it and it's like electronics kind of physics nerd not a comp sci person so i always have a bit of c++ envy kind

of thing of people who did proper comp sci degrees whereas i was just sat like coding fortran in a lab in physics and just doing coding on the side at home but um yeah i love doing what i do seems like it served you well it was good fortran side wasn't probably not the most useful thing i've ever done but um i was building websites also to show my results of fortran and that definitely is that definitely paid off because that was back in the mosaic days that's how old i am but yeah so you mentioned you only have like one commit as of late, which was a deletion. Did you get to break the code editor out

or is it mostly hobby stuff? I mean, at work, you're the senior director. Oh yeah, I mean, on GitHub, it's mostly just little fixes and things they let me get away with. And then my code is just all hobby stuff generally or demo stuff or showing things off. So like some examples.

I'm building the Raspberry Pi. This is with Alex Ellis,ice the grow lab project right now so if you want to check out grow lab i can send you a link for the show notes whatever but it's it's using uh raspberry pi's and cameras and sensors and just having for some fun and doing data capture and sending that data up and doing that so i'm doing playing with that in a minute i've got like my raspberry pi cluster behind me uh you can't quite see it in your but i've got a raspberry pi cluster that i'm trying to play with at the moment i've got like you know automate my christmas trees obviously everybody hook them up to get up actions you know whatever just a bit of fun i mostly spend most of my time kind of helping other people with their open source projects and helping make sure they can

be successful and try to get them what they need in, one of the things that we're doing is we're bringing all these maintainers together. We're trying to do the best thing that we can do to do an unconference given COVID times. So we're running this thing called globalmaintainersummit.github.com. And what we're going to try and do is bring maintainers together and have a big group therapy session in a way, but also share knowledge because, again, maintainers are awesome. And people have developed different tricks for handling different situations and different people. So we kind of want to bring those people together and provide a space for maintainers to get together. So if you are a maintainer of a

big project, then feel free to come along to globalmainter summit.gitlob.com i actually got the domain name maintain i misspelled maintainers the other day and um spelt it as maintain nerds and that was too good a typo to miss so i went and registered all those domains so if you do maintain nerds as well that'll forward you off to global maintainer summit because i just thought that was an awesome an awesome domain name to add into my collection of domain name side projects that i'll probably never ever get a nice one but worth collecting yeah yeah i'll need it one day very cool yeah this upcoming thing with maintainer week is pretty cool we're hoping to play a fun role in it we have a special secret very secret guest that we're hoping to appear we'll see we'll see but it's gonna be fun june

7th is the week of maintainer week that's right well maintainer summit's part of that we're hoping to appear. We'll see. We'll see. But it's going to be fun. June 7th is the week of Maintainer Week. We'll have Maintainer Summit as part of that. We're a part of that. Some others are part of that from Tidelift and whatnot. And so it's all about finding ways to support maintainers because, as you said before, burnout is totally possible. We don't want to gamify, get up to the point where you feel like you have to overachieve. It's really about

participation. It's about showing up, as you said before, consistently bringing what you have of value to the table of open source. And it could be docs, it could be code, it could be community, it could be governance, it could be project management, it could be all these different things. Like it definitely is everybody working to the greater good of what open source can do. And I think coming back to celebrating this mission to Mars as part of that, like that's a win. So maintainer summit, maintainer week, awesome. I like it. I'm excited about it.

Going back to what you said earlier about surfacing to maintainers their dependence in better ways, I think that's such a great goal. Because when you think about open source and its purest, it's a gift to the world. Like you said, these people are like the most helpful, nice, giving people. I mean, they're

givers, like you said. because it's what it is. You're giving your code out there for anybody to have and to hold and to change and to do what they're going to do according to the license. And that's a gift. And it's a weird gift because so often like you're standing there giving something to somebody and like you hand it to them, right? And you say, oh, open it quick. I want to see your reaction.

I want to see, I want to have that delight of like you receiving this and enjoying it and in open source you don't always get that part of it right like you give it to the world but then and there's and then you find out six years later somebody was using it it's also weird that like it's one of the only places where you give somebody a gift and then they complain about your gift and tell you how much it sucks and how you need to fix it and stuff and all those things and so i like the idea of letting people know without having to get reports back from your users and teasing. I was teasing Daniel about putting a phone home in curl so he can know his actual use. Those kind of things.

I mean, some people do put metrics in like, I want to know who's using this. And so here's what I do. And that's their prerogative with their software. But it'd be great if we could let people know how much impact, because there's lots of motivations for open source. One of those motivations is I want to maximize my impact with my software. And like helping power a mission to Mars is one of those things. Like look at that leverage.

Like you wrote this code and now you are part of something bigger than yourself and you have massive amounts of impact. And sometimes you just don't know if you're having the impact you want to have so if you guys can help in that way i know there's like the dependency graph and stuff like that now there's a new section like how many repos depend upon this package or this repo like that stuff starting to get in there how are you thinking it could go further or what else could you do beyond what you've already done, which is some dependency stuff inside GitHub.com to help maintainers really know who's out there using their stuff? Yeah, I think it's two ways. So we need to help people know what their dependencies

are, and then help them keep them up to date as well. Because the amount of sort of old security vulnerabilities and things you got kicking around, you didn't realize because you, you know, so we need to do that side. So we need side. For people who are consuming, help them figure out what it is they are consuming and how to keep it up to date because that's kind of the problem they have. And then how to support the projects that they're taking the critical dependencies on. Which projects are out there? If they can't support them with time, if they can't support them with resources, then maybe they can provide financial resources to, again, help that project

if that's something that we can do. On the user developer side, yeah, helping know how many people are dependent on this project would be awesome. My dream would be to someday do even more stuff around that. It's tricky to do, but now we've got actions and things, I would love to do a way where if you've got a dependency, one of the ways you could donate would be to say like yeah i will donate anonymously the results of my bold to the these dependencies you know and then as a dependency you could say okay well let's go run this thing and go you know run it with people who take a dependency on me and see

if i break them because i'm going to release this as a minor release kind of thing I don't think it should break anybody but oh apparently it broke 90% of my dependencies people who are dependent on my code oh that's something I would you know I would love to know if I was an open source maintainer now doing the compute for that is a different question and doing the like opt-ins and making that be done in a github way that's kind of invisible to you and lightweight and easy and things like that's all hard to do. But I think there's just tons that we could go do to give value back to the maintainers because they're the ones that are doing the awesome. They're the ones that are like giving all these gifts out to the world. And so the more things that we can go build to try to give that value back, I think the better. So yeah, we keep on looking to see what we can do.

And that's the kind of stuff that you are seeking maintainer input on right like what could we do to maintain your input on anything if you like but also you know i mean like bearing in mind like if it's if it's uh i'm trying to think of an example that the you know certain changes we probably know and there's probably good reasons why we've got them that way. But what it is that we can do to help you. What is it we can do to make your life more sustainable, easier as a maintainer, more, you know, give you more joy as a maintainer? How can we help your communities work better? Hacking communities is fascinating and how the psychology of crowds works and all that sort of stuff. You know, Psycho Gopher obviously do a lot in that space

and we're doing stuff in that space as well when it comes to like discussions and how we, you know, we've added capabilities recently where you can like temporarily switch interaction limits on and things. So if the community needs a bit of a timeout or if you need a timeout or whatever, if you want to go on vacation,

then add these capabilities in. I like the, we added the ability to set your status and you can sort of say you're on vacation and stuff like that. Things like that, even though it doesn't mean anything really, like it doesn't stop too much, is you as a maintainer,

me being able to say, I'm on vacation right now, I'm not going to answer for two weeks, makes me feel less guilty about taking a vacation for two weeks. And so there's little things we can do like that that help you psychologically not get burnt out and help you survive and help you maintain as well as the things of value you know so it's about managing the entire person it's fascinating so

this is one of the reasons why i'm looking towards the forward to maintain a week as well you mentioned i'm just to try and yeah like tease out kind of the humans behind how we can kind of make some changes to help everybody's lives and help everybody thrive when we are getting these wins because it's open source is amazing and the communities in there i owe my career to open source i owe my children's education to open source and to the friends i've made and i owe like most of my friends have i've made from the open source communities i've been lucky to be a part of. And so I just want more and more people to be able to have these experiences.

This is such a breath of fresh air, honestly. I want to celebrate this win because there was a day when it seemed like that kind of response wasn't coming from GitHub. And I think this is prior to the Microsoft acquisition. If you recall, there was a dear GitHub repository out there. And it wasn't so much, it was around maintainers and the voices of maintainers not being heard. And so I think, you know, just together with you, Martin, celebrating that win for GitHub, that you are listening, that you are inviting maintainers to come and speak to you

and to evolve the all things GitHub essentially to make it better for maintainers and better for everybody, really. But there was a time when it seemed like GitHub was listening less, that they were dogmatic in their ways or whatever it might have been and that repository is out there we'll link in the show notes for just posterity's sake but you know i think that's a good thing to celebrate that win because you are listening and you've already sent your email on this podcast so you're on the hook yeah exactly somebody emails you you're gonna have to answer right and that's how

it works i'll send you my screenshot of my unread email account as well. But yeah, no, yeah. That email again is martinwoodwood.github.com or at martinwoodwood on Twitter. But yeah, that's all good. Exactly. Or when you're talking on Twitter, ccnatfreeman. And there you go. You might get your change.

It might already be in the works. Yeah, yeah. Try to go to me first. That would be great. Make my life easier. Have less dramas. Fight your FOMO at changelog.com slash weekly. Huge thanks to our partners, Linode Fastly and LaunchDarkly. When we need music, we summon the beat freak, Breakmaster Cylinder. Huge thanks to Breakmaster for all their awesome work.

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