I’ve written before about how to start contributing to OSS and I wrote for the Petabridge blog about “How to Use Github Professionally” - both of those posts were aimed at helping developers who had experience working in private software organizations bring their experience and passion into open source software and more specifically, how to use Github as a platform to do that effectively.
You Have to Have Skin in the Game
Periodically I receive inquiries from people in the startup community who are exploring an idea or want an estimate on how expensive this particular idea may be to implement - as is common in the entrepreneurial community I’m happy to pay it forward (because I received help like this when I was just getting started too) and review a pitch deck, specification, or business plan and offer my advice if the person is someone I’ve interacted with online, in-person, or is referred through someone else I know.
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Introducing Sdkbin - The Marketplace for Software Developers
I’ve written several posts recently about creating sustainable open source projects by treating them like proper businesses - my journey for the past 5-6 years since founding Petabridge has been a quest to find a way to create sustainable, profitable business models built on top of the open source software I’ve spent the last 6-7 years developing.
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The New Rules for Playing in Microsoft's Open Source Sandbox
Here we go again. “The Day AppGet Died” - the short version: OSS developer fills a hole in the Windows ecosystem, Microsoft offers him a job to work on this kind of product inside the company, ghosts him, releases their competing product which appears to have borrowed heavily from his designs, doesn’t attribute original developer’s work, Internet gets mad, Microsoft gives a non-apology apology, and maybe some kind of resolution.
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How to Build Sustainable Open Source Software Projects
In my last post about “The Next Decade of .NET Open Source” I alluded to a future blog post about open source sustainability. This is it.
Some background: in January 2015, fresh off of the very public failure...
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How to Configure Visual Studio to Use SourceLink to Step into NuGet Package Source
I love SourceLink - it’s fast becoming a standard practice to include SourceLink support in all open source NuGet packages in order to make them easier to debug. We’ve included SourceLink support in Akka.NET and some of our other projects for some time now.
However, I’m embarrassed to...
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The Next Decade of .NET Open Source
Over the past week there’s been a ton of chatter about the state of the .NET ecosystem and, more specifically, as to whether or not its OSS ecosystem is healthy and sustainable over the long term.
I won’t bother with the details, but the substantive criticisms amount to:
- If...
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Problems and Solutions with the .NET Foundation Maturity Ladder
This is largely the text of an issue I posted related to the .NET Foundation’s new proposed Maturity Ladder for .NET OSS projects. I am fully supportive of the .NET Foundation’s stated mission and wrote this in the hopes of trying to help it achieve that through a little...
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It's Just Not a Big Deal
In my professional life, I’ve actively conditioned myself to tolerate and accept risks when necessary. Risk tolerance is something that can be learned and taught. But risk tolerance is fundamentally a contextual matter - two people with identical means and skills can have totally different reactions to the stressors...
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The High Price of Comfort
Chief among the values prized by fellow millennials is comfort. It’s reflected in our more casual dress and our increasing preference for impersonal forms of communication, such as text or Slack. Our desire to form self-reinforcing informational and social bubbles, where we can limit our exposure to different and potentially...