Those who are near me for any length of time know that I like open source. To me it speaks of a kind of engineering purity that I don’t see in a lot of places. I thought I’d take some time and write down what open source means to me, and what I look for in projects that I work on. First, I think its important to define the two kinds of source that there are and the degrees of openness I’m referring to.

I was recently talking with some people from the open source world about what it means to own a project and this got me thinking about some of my own projects. What is my stake in them at this point? Really for me the question is less of “is this my project” and more “do I need to take this more seriously now”. Let me explain. For my own projects, they are things that I do that are really just for me and if they fail or die its not an issue because after all they were just my own projects.

I often get asked about why I am always so frustrated with the code that people tend to write. This discussion came up recently between some friends about why NetAuth is both in production with Void, and not 1.0 yet. For me, this has to do with the expectations of quality I subject most software to and my expectations for the risks an organization should be willing to put up with.

Recently at work I’ve been setting up a Nomad cluster to take over the production workload in our primary serving cluster. This process has taken several months at this point to prototype and develop, and along the way I’ve learned a lot about cluster operations with Nomad. Coming from the world of Google and Borg I had a pretty good handle on how cluster level schedulers work, but I’m still amazed at some of the things that are either dramatically more elegant in the HashiCorp stack, or less enthusiastically, things that make me want to pull my hair out.

I’ve just gotten back from the Apollo 11 movie, which I saw in IMAX. The film is a documentary that is all about Apollo 11 and steps you through in a very linear view the progress of the Apollo 11 mission. The story is told without narration or interviews, and features many segments that are shown in real time. Some of the things that I think are so incredible about this film are that it shows the people behind the mission.