Technology
What if you ran your internal, closed-source, proprietary, mega-corporate projects like open source projects? Similar styles? Similar tools? In This Episode: First step in a software project? Meetings! But, but … what if we run internal projects like they were open source projects? Submitting patches to company projects, no matter where they are. IT departments: The people who say no. Internal utility projects? Or open source product products? Skunkworxing Pretending internally focussed apps are open source apps. The expensive barrier of entry for official projects. You can’t backlog an exploration. Feudalism and the company ownership of your skills. Toyota and the kanban thing. The Blue Ocean Notion Engineers, the trolls in the back room. The economy of getting things done. The meritocracy of things that work. We won’t discuss the merits of hard copy RSS. Open source repos as a way to avoid executive escalation. Branching another org’s project if they won’t play ball. An application built on two power structures. Babylonian dating service vs the dart method. Multiple project owners does not a happy project make. Super-printer-mega-comm vs printer chat. The economy of utility vs the economy of power. Dark Net: the response to authoritarianism. XMPP: It’s not a Best Practice on the Best Practice Blog Doing development on the sly is best done using open source development tools. The Resistance? Their office hours are posted here. When you’re not being managed, you end up using open source techniques when you want to get things done. Writing software professionally vs writing software as a professional. The chains are in our minds. In the open source world, you get to be Apple and say “no”. You go underground so you can, eventually, go above ground. Digging a trench around managers so they can’t help but fall where you want. Do you have to be an open-source kind of person? What if the engineering director forced open-source by fiat? Differently motivated developers. Developers and software as a continuum. Or the chasm. Or something. Aunt Mabel, Designer Intuition and the Ophthalmologist Story points as a measure of reluctance. Slides vs prototype, forced buy-in vs peer persuasion. Links: Skunk works Open source Kanban Clojure XMPP Ejabberd Download MP3