Pete Gonzalez
GitHub / Zulip chat / Mastodon / Twitter I’m a software architect. My focus is developer productivity: As a software project grows in size, your build system often turns into project in itself. These systems shape our daily life at work. Probably (hopefully) this investment is accounted for as part of project cost and planning... But what’s it like using these tools? Are they easy to understand? Are the operations speedy? While a lot of attention is given to product experiences, we often overlook our own user experience for reading, writing, and shipping code. Investing in this area creates efficiency gains that multiply across every person. Usually those people are your own friends and colleagues. It can be very rewarding to work on systems that make their lives better!Open Source
Some problems are better suited to open source than others. The success stories tend to have three qualities: - The goals are well-defined, even if the engineering is difficult- The user audience includes a lot of software engineers
- Some of them can be paid to work on it That describes most build tools! Different companies might be making very different apps, but we all face similar engineering challenges. Since your build system isn’t shipped to customers, it’s relatively easy to share this code. Open source isn’t just about getting free bug fixes, however. The real payoff is community: By joining forces, we can create more ambitious solutions. Open source connects your team to a network of other smart people with fresh perspectives. It’s also an easy way to promote your business as an attractive employer.