03 Jun 2020

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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30 Jan 2020

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.

Petabridge logo - a .NET OSS company

Some background: in January 2015, fresh off of the very public failure...

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24 Jan 2020

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 embarassed to...

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23 Jan 2020

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:

  1. If...

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28 Sep 2019

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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16 Oct 2018

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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04 Oct 2018

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...

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05 May 2018

What We Leave Behind

It was roughly a year ago this week that I fled California in pursuit of greener economic pastures. I came to Texas an economic refugee; despite running a successful business in California for a number of years I watched my profit steadily fall beneath the relentless tide of cost of...

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20 Oct 2017

The Necessity of Systematic Thinking

I spend a lot of my professional time training other software developers on how to build next-generation applications. Distributed and concurrent systems; stream processing; stateful web applications; soft real-time applications; and so forth. Cutting edge stuff for the majority of my industry.

One of the huge advantages of inexperience, such...

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01 Jun 2017

The Coming .NET Renaissance

There’s been ample grumbling about various changes in the .NET ecosystem of late, but I’m more excited about .NET than ever.

First, the decoupling of .NET from Windows. Mono started this work in earnest 15 years ago, and .NET Core + UWP is the next step. Turning .NET into...

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