JSJam Live with the Open Sauced Team
Open source experts share insights on collaboration, sustaining projects, and building strong developer communities
Episode Description
JavaScript Jam hosts Nick Taylor and Becca from Open Sauced to discuss open source contribution, maintainer burnout, and project health metrics.
Episode Summary
This JavaScript Jam episode brings together Nick Taylor and Becca from Open Sauced alongside regular guests Fuzzy and Toby to explore what it means to contribute meaningfully to open source. The conversation opens with Fuzzy sharing insights from the Linux Foundation's all-hands retreat, describing the organization as "the janitors of open source" responsible for sustaining the top 5% of projects that deliver the vast majority of open source value. The discussion shifts to Open Sauced, a platform that provides data-driven insights into open source project health, tracking metrics like contributor activity, PR velocity, and the bus factor — going beyond simple star counts to offer a more realistic picture of a project's vitality. Becca introduces her upcoming blog series on open source alternatives and highlights her post on preventing maintainer burnout through better contributor practices. A lively debate about pre-commit hooks reveals differing perspectives between professional team contexts and open source projects where contributor environments are unknown. The group also explores Open Sauced's contributor onboarding journey, from the introductory guestbook repository through the pizza-verse project, designed to ease newcomers into the contribution workflow. Throughout, the speakers emphasize that open source contribution extends well beyond code to include documentation, community engagement, and advocacy, while cautioning against a purely transactional approach to contributions.
Chapters
00:00:00 - Opening and Linux Foundation Insights
The episode kicks off with host Anthony Campolo welcoming listeners and briefly mentioning the AHA stack newsletter before bringing Fuzzy into the conversation. Fuzzy shares that he has just returned from the Linux Foundation's all-hands retreat in San Diego, where roughly 300 people gathered at a golf resort for a multi-day event.
Fuzzy describes how the retreat fundamentally shifted his understanding of the Linux Foundation's scope. He explains that the organization works with the top 5% of open source projects, which account for the vast majority of open source value, following an inverse logarithmic distribution. He characterizes the foundation as "the janitors of open source," responsible for bringing standards, funding, and long-term sustainability to critical projects that enterprises depend on.
00:07:00 - Introducing Open Sauced and Virtual Coffee
Nick Taylor and Becca join the space and introduce themselves. Nick is a senior software engineer at Open Sauced, while Becca serves as the developer experience lead. Becca also shares the story of Virtual Coffee, a community she founded in April 2020 after losing her first dev job when COVID hit, which now meets twice weekly and includes lunch-and-learns, interest groups, and various media channels.
Nick explains how he met Becca through a Code Newbie Twitter chat at the start of the pandemic, eventually becoming one of Virtual Coffee's earliest members. The two discuss the community's waitlist system, clarifying it exists not to gatekeep but to scale at a pace volunteers can support. Anthony adds that having a small barrier to entry helps ensure members genuinely want to participate rather than treating community involvement as a checkbox for job hunting.
00:11:50 - Contributing to Open Source the Right Way
The conversation turns to how people should approach open source contributions. Nick shares his personal journey of contributing to Dev.to because he genuinely used and liked the product, eventually becoming their first external contributor and later joining the team. He emphasizes that while open source work can lead to employment, it's not guaranteed, and the way you communicate and interact with people matters as much as the code itself.
Fuzzy builds on this by distinguishing between being "part of" a community versus being "a part of" it, and references a Theo video cautioning against contributing to open source purely for job prospects. He argues that contributions extend far beyond code to include documentation, advocacy, and community engagement, warning that focusing solely on development pigeonholes people unnecessarily. Anthony echoes this by sharing his own experience getting started through developer relations activities like hosting spaces, podcasts, and writing content.
00:17:45 - Maintainer Burnout and Contributor Etiquette
Becca introduces her upcoming 29-day blog series on open source alternatives and discusses a recently published post titled "Stop Burning Out Maintainers: An Empathetic Guide for Contributors." The post addresses how contributor behavior directly impacts maintainer sustainability, offering practical advice like reading directions, checking your work, being a problem solver, communicating appropriately, and avoiding making demands on maintainers.
Anthony highlights the post's detailed checklist for contributors, noting how valuable such concrete guidance is for juniors entering open source. Nick adds that maintainers share responsibility too, advocating for automating checks where possible since most open source interactions are asynchronous through issues and pull requests. This naturally leads into a debate about pre-commit hooks, with Nick favoring them for open source projects where contributor environments are unpredictable, while Dev prefers handling linting in the IDE or CI pipeline.
00:23:17 - The Pre-Commit Hook Debate
Nick details what he includes in pre-commit hooks: Prettier for formatting across JavaScript, TypeScript, and Markdown files, plus running tests only on affected files using tools like Jest or Vitest. Dev pushes back, preferring to handle checks in his IDE or CI rather than having commits blocked. Anthony frames this as a question of context — professional teams with standardized tooling versus open source projects where contributors use varied editors.
Nick makes his case by recounting how it took him a year and a half at Dev.to to systematically eliminate lint errors, starting with warnings before eventually enforcing errors. He argues that in open source, where contributors might use VS Code, Vim, or other editors with different configurations, pre-commit hooks provide a necessary safety net for maintaining code quality and uniformity over time. Dev concedes the point, acknowledging this gap in his experience with direct open source project work.
00:28:06 - What Is Open Sauced and Its Tech Stack
Becca provides the core pitch for Open Sauced: a platform designed to empower everyone in open source — contributors, maintainers, and teams — by providing deeper insights into project health and contributor activity. She draws an analogy to IMDb, where you can explore movies, studios, and individual actors' careers, similarly allowing users to understand both projects and the people contributing to them.
Nick dives into the technical stack powering Open Sauced: Next.js with the Pages router, Tailwind, TypeScript, and Nest.js for the API. He notes they use the GitHub REST API rather than GraphQL, and have adopted Radix and Shadcn for components. He also discusses the workspace feature currently behind a feature flag, which will give every individual user a personal workspace alongside a UI refresh, while enterprise customers get additional capabilities.
00:34:48 - Onboarding New Contributors to Open Source
Becca walks through Open Sauced's deliberately planned contributor journey designed to ease newcomers into open source. The first step is an intro course where chapter five guides users through their first contribution to a guestbook repository using a CLI tool. From there, contributors can move to the pizza-verse repository, which teaches forking, cloning, and writing good commit messages through fun pizza-themed issues.
The team discusses making these onboarding paths culturally inclusive after learning that not everyone is familiar with pizza. The conversation takes a lighthearted detour into fusion pizza varieties, from butter chicken pizza in Montreal to chicken tikka masala pizza in Glasgow. Becca explains that beyond beginner repositories, Open Sauced maintains issues tagged as beginner-friendly across their docs and app repos, creating a structured path that gradually increases in complexity while remaining supportive.
00:42:03 - Fuzzy's Linux Foundation Work and Million 3.0 Preview
Nick asks Fuzzy about his move from the Astro core team to the Linux Foundation. Fuzzy explains he's working with the Security Knowledge Framework, focusing on building training tools for developers around security best practices and enterprise readiness. He argues that certifications matter more than many in the indie open source community realize, as they provide the credibility enterprises need to reduce hiring risk.
Toby then previews the Million 3.0 launch party happening that Friday, teasing improvements to the compiler, a new linter, and significant performance enhancements for the virtual DOM library. He keeps details intentionally vague to preserve the surprise for the launch event, but emphasizes the release overcomes previous limitations and delivers faster runtime performance for React applications.
00:52:35 - Stars Aren't Everything: Measuring Open Source Health
The conversation pivots to how Open Sauced provides more meaningful metrics than GitHub stars alone. Nick argues that stars are a top-level metric similar to a company's stock price — informative but incomplete. He uses the example of mature projects like jQuery that have accumulated massive star counts but may not reflect current activity, comparing it to bragging about a high school championship decades later.
Anthony provides a concrete example with YouTube-DL, where the heavily starred but unmaintained original took ten minutes to download a video compared to five seconds with a less-starred but actively maintained fork. Becca then creates a live Open Sauced insight page for Million JS, demonstrating how the platform reveals contributor concentration, PR velocity trends, and network connections between contributors — data that helps projects understand their health and identify potential risks like the bus factor.
01:06:12 - Closing Thoughts and Shoutouts
Toby shares his perspective that open source contribution is genuinely beneficial for personal growth and networking but shouldn't be treated as a guaranteed path to employment. He emphasizes the ecosystem's richness while cautioning against transactional expectations. The group then goes around sharing their recommended links and projects for the audience.
Fuzzy encourages everyone to check out Astro and to always bet on open source. Dev gives a quick pitch for Clerk, the authentication platform where he works. Nick directs listeners to Open Sauced's website and his Twitch stream at nick.live, mentioning a recent Astro stream on the CFE.dev YouTube channel. Anthony wraps up by thanking all the guests and pointing listeners to the JavaScript Jam newsletter and website.
Transcript
00:00:00 - Fuzzy
[unclear].
00:02:49 - Anthony Campolo
All right. Hello, hello. Welcome to JavaScript Jam. We're going to be joined by Nicky T. in a little bit. He is finishing up a stream right now, but it looks like my fuzzy friend came to hang out. What's up, man? I'll go ahead and throw you an invite in case you want to join. I should share our newsletter. You'll get a kick out of this one. My headline was the AHA Stack: Astro, htmx, and Alpine. Quite the combo, right? I've only ever used Alpine very sparingly, but I remember it was pretty hyped up back in the day a couple years ago. I feel like I heard about Alpine a lot, not so much anymore, but it seems well aligned for a stack like this because, you know, it was more of the "not super into JavaScript" kind of thing. Looks like we got Fuzzy up here. What's up, man?
00:04:00 - Fuzzy
Waka waka, bro. How you all doing?
00:04:03 - Anthony Campolo
Doing good. How are you?
00:04:06 - Fuzzy
Shattered. I just came back from San Diego for the Linux Foundation's All Hands retreat.
00:04:13 - Anthony Campolo
Oh yeah?
00:04:13 - Fuzzy
Yeah. Oh my God.
00:04:15 - Anthony Campolo
How many people show up to something like that? Like how big is the Linux Foundation?
00:04:18 - Fuzzy
Oh, it was huge. There were like 300 people there. We hit maximum occupancy right at the resort they had us at, which was this little golf resort just outside San Diego. Absolutely stunning, put together fantastically. But I learned more about the LF there than what was put out there, and my complete understanding of the organization has completely changed. Hell, dude, I was sitting there in the second row while Jim Zemlin was giving a keynote presentation on Monday morning. It was insane. Literally insane.
00:05:03 - Anthony Campolo
What are some of your big takeaways in terms of things you learned or perspectives that were shifted?
00:05:09 - Fuzzy
Oh, perspectives that were shifted would probably be where I would start on that one. That's a great question, actually. The size and scope of the Linux Foundation is just broader, and the reach is far greater than I thought originally. They deal with the top 5% of open source projects, which literally bring 96% of open source value. If you think of open source, it's got an inverse logarithmic long-tail kind of curve where the number of projects is vast, but the number of adoptions kind of skews toward the top 5% of projects in open source. And these are ones that are rapidly used by enterprise, and these are the ones that are then put underneath the foundation so they can actually have standards put toward them, funding brought toward them, events, things like that, to basically garner support for the projects and keep the viability of these projects going forever, kind of. The Linux Foundation, in a sense, dude, is like the janitors of open source.
00:06:31 - Fuzzy
That's what we are.
00:06:32 - Anthony Campolo
Very thankless but absolutely essential job.
00:06:36 - Fuzzy
Hell yeah. Hell yeah. I mean, there are so many different parts and divisions to it that when it all comes together, it's a juggernaut set up to help projects in open source be sustainable, be maintainable, and be there for users in the future. It's really interesting.
00:07:01 - Anthony Campolo
Awesome. So we got Nicky T. up here. We also got Becca as well. Super excited to have both of you. I'm glad to have Fuzzy up here as well because we're going to be talking open source and Open Sauced. We had Brian, the CEO, on the show back in the day, but now he has a whole team of people. Nick, why don't you introduce yourself, and then Becca can go after?
00:07:26 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having us on, and nice to see you, Fuzzy. My name is Nick Taylor. I am currently a senior software engineer over at Open Sauced, and we're a small team, but we're having fun and building out what I think is cool stuff that will be helpful for people in the open source ecosystem.
00:07:51 - Becca
Hey, I am Becca. I am a teammate of Nick's. I am the developer experience lead over at Open Sauced. I do a lot of writing, speaking, and education, and occasional code comes into play there sometimes. I am also part of the Virtual Coffee community.
00:08:15 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, Virtual Coffee, you should give a little pitch for, for that.
00:08:20 - Becca
All right, I can do that. So Virtual Coffee, we've been doing it since April of 2020, which is when COVID hit and I lost my first dev job. So I said, "Does anybody want to meet up for virtual coffee?" and we've been going ever since. We meet up twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays to chat about usually tech-related things, because most of us are in tech. We're in all different stages, but we also do other things. We have lunch-and-learn sessions. We have what we call coffee table groups, which are small interest groups of people coming together to learn about something new or to help provide accountability for each other. And we have a newsletter, podcast, YouTube channel. We try. We try and do all of the things, I feel like.
00:09:06 - Fuzzy
Very cool.
00:09:07 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. And if anyone wants to drop links and whatnot, feel free to do so. We can put them up on the jumbotron for our audience.
00:09:17 - Dev Agrawal
Yeah.
00:09:17 - Anthony Campolo
So yeah, I first heard of Virtual Coffee because one of my coworkers at my very first job, Lucia, was a Virtual Coffee member. And it seems like a very cool community. If I remember, it was kind of an invite thing, like people can apply to be in it. Is that kind of correct?
00:09:38 - Becca
Yeah. So right now we have a waitlist, VirtualCoffee.io/join. I'll try and drop that link. Right now the waitlist is really short, so we've managed to get lots of people in and we're hoping to open up membership pretty soon. But I would say, hey, if you want to join, definitely sign up for that waitlist. You'll get in really quickly. We just love having new people around.
00:10:02 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, no, that's great. That's great to hear.
00:10:04 - Nick Taylor
Yeah.
00:10:05 - Anthony Campolo
Cool. So go ahead.
00:10:06 - Nick Taylor
I was going to say that's how I actually met Becca. So at the start of the pandemic, when everybody was in lockdown and I was still working at DEV.to, I met her because I responded to her in a CodeNewbie thread when they used to do those CodeNewbie Twitter kind of threads, or like a Twitter chat.
00:10:32 - Anthony Campolo
Sorry.
00:10:33 - Nick Taylor
Thank you. And yeah, that's how I met her. I was one of the first people going to Virtual Coffee, and we've known each other since then. We're best buddies now, and now we're coworkers too, which is super cool. Just a note about the waitlist Becca mentioned: we didn't used to have that. But the community got a lot larger, and it's all volunteer-based, including myself, Becca, and many other people. So we went with the invites because we wanted to be able to scale at a pace that the volunteers could support. It's not to gatekeep and say, "Oh, now you're VIP, you can come in." It's really just because it is all volunteer-based.
00:11:20 - Anthony Campolo
To a certain extent too, you want people who want to be there, you know? Because some people are just like, "Oh, I want a job. I'm supposed to join a community. What community should I join?" And it's like, well, you should join a community because you want to contribute to the community and actually participate in it. So I think having some sort of barrier isn't necessarily always a bad thing, as long as, as you say, it's not gatekeeping. It's not an exclusionary thing. I think that's totally within a community's right to do something like that.
00:11:51 - Fuzzy
Yeah.
00:11:51 - Nick Taylor
And it kind of ties into what we're going to talk about, open source, because contributions are always welcome in open source, whatever they are. But there's a common thing, and I'll let the others speak to this too: people always ask me, "What do I contribute to? I don't know what to contribute to." I always give the same answer, and it's that the stuff I contributed to was stuff I'm interested in or I use. I've been doing a lot of stuff in the front-end space, but when I was at Netlify it was more CLI and Node stuff and Deno, but that's all open source stuff. I started contributing to DEV.to because I signed up and started blogging there, and then I ended up becoming the first contributor outside of the core team because they said, "Hey, is anybody interested in open source?" I liked the product and I wanted to make it better, and that's what kept me hooked on DEV.to.
00:12:59 - Nick Taylor
And it was definitely cool to start working there eventually because of my open source work. But I do have to always caution that just because you do stuff in open source doesn't mean you're guaranteed a job. It's definitely a pathway to potentially land a role, whether it's for that particular project or something else, because everything's in the open. People see how you interact with people. The code is definitely a part of it, whether that's documentation or building out a site or some service, but the big thing is really how you communicate with people. Obviously there's no product without any code or service, but for me, the interaction between people in the community is a big thing. Like, "Yeah, that person is pretty awesome. I would definitely hang out with them." And then there's other people where it's like, "Oh, they came in and said this was terrible, fix it." That's probably somebody I would never hire.
00:14:07 - Anthony Campolo
For sure. Yeah. It's funny you mentioned people asking and wanting to get involved in open source. My go-to was always, "Check out Open Sauced." Fuzzy, were you going to say something?
00:14:23 - Fuzzy
Yeah, I just wanted to pick up on what Nick was saying. Nick, how you doing, bro? Loving your work recently. Also, Becca, pleasure to meet you.
00:14:31 - Anthony Campolo
Support DevRels. It's your first time meeting. That's awesome.
00:14:35 - Fuzzy
Yeah, yeah, for real.
00:14:38 - Anthony Campolo
That's a good one, let me say.
00:14:41 - Fuzzy
Appreciate that, dude. What I was about to say was, when it comes to communities, and this came from Astro, what I've realized is that people can either be one of two things when they're part of a community: they can either be part of it, or they can be a part of it, if you get me. They either stand separate or they stand within, kind of thing. It's a small minutiae of detail, but when you recognize where those two stand in relation to the project, you can build bridges to bring them in if you want, or alternatively, you can just respect their distance equally, or respect their input. It's one of those "the devil's in the detail" things. But in terms of people jumping into open source and into communities, there was that video Theo posted last week about how you shouldn't really contribute directly to open source with the intention that it's going to help you get a job.
00:15:51 - Fuzzy
Open source is one of those things where you can contribute not just through code, but through augmented documentation, talking about the projects you're passionate about, sharing information and community, communicating what your ambitions are about things, and just really being part of the narrative. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate. And that is really the heart of how I feel people should act when it comes to open source. There are that many things going on, and it's not all about code. I think if we just focus on the code side, the development side, we isolate and pigeonhole people very easily and very quickly. But yeah, sorry guys, I'm going to dip off for a couple of minutes, but I'll be listening.
00:16:44 - Anthony Campolo
All good, man. You're welcome to join anytime. Yeah, I think I found the tweet you were talking about and just pinned it. This is a classic Theo tweet that can seem a little aggro, but I think it's actually got a good message in it. He's basically saying that if you're really mercenary about it and just randomly filing pull requests in projects you don't use, that's that spray-and-pray approach some people bring to this kind of thing. You really want to dig into something, use something, become familiar with it, and then you can really make some contributions to it. And what Fuzzy was saying, it doesn't even need to be code. I've told my story a million times on JavaScript Jam. Most people know I kind of got my start just DevRel-ing for open source. I was doing things like this, hosting spaces and doing podcasts and writing content. And that's one of the things I really appreciate about Becca. You write so much content and you ship a ton of content.
00:17:45 - Anthony Campolo
What are some of the things that you've written recently? Because I know you're always shipping stuff, so why don't you share some of that?
00:17:52 - Becca
I have to laugh because I'm getting ready to start a 29 Days of Open Source Alternatives series. It starts tomorrow, so I'm going to be shipping a blog post every day, and I think 12 shorts maybe. I've done nothing like this before, not even in grad school, so I'm going to push it to the limits. But I did drop a post yesterday. I wasn't planning on writing it because I'm working on drafting these 29 posts, right? But I have ADHD and my brain said, "You're not allowed to draft anything until you draft this post."
00:18:30 - Anthony Campolo
I saw that tweet and I was waiting for what it was going to be.
00:18:34 - Becca
I forgot about the tweet. Let me see if I can post the reply here. Yeah, here we go. It's called "Stop Burning Out Maintainers: An Empathetic Guide for Contributors." There's going to be a follow-up post for this that looks at it from the opposite perspective, but that's not going to come until March because I've just got too much to do otherwise. The idea is that, and it was kind of inspired by one of Theo's videos talking about how people need to stop telling other people to contribute to open source, which I don't generally agree with. But looking at it from the perspective of, okay, maintainer burnout is a problem for sure, and we need open source to be sustainable, and it can't be sustainable if we're burning out our maintainers. A lot of this can be rectified if contributors practice being good open source citizens. So it kind of breaks down the different ways you can do that. I'll just go through a couple of the headings: read the directions, check your work, be a problem solver, communicate appropriately, and don't make demands.
00:19:51 - Becca
So there's lots of different steps in there. But I think if we do these things, it's going to decrease maintainer burnout because you don't want to wake up in the morning and not want to look at your GitHub notifications because you know there's going to be a contribution coming in there that is just really exhausting you. That's the absolute opposite of what we need. And I think part of that comes with educating contributors, and the other part comes from contributors really taking the initiative to make sure they're able to participate in a way that is useful to open source in general.
00:20:30 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I see in this section, "Be a problem solver," you have a whole checklist full of really, really great advice for people. Check your error messages. Have you read the documentation? Have you checked for typos? It seems so basic, but since we're really gearing this toward telling people to do this to get a job, there's this implicit thing that they're probably a junior. They may not have done a lot of this, and to just say, "Go figure it out," that's not very useful. But a guide like this, with a specific checklist where you need to check all these boxes, is so, so helpful for people.
00:21:14 - Becca
Yeah, I sure hope so. Go ahead.
00:21:17 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, I was going to say, no, having a guide like this is great. I do think there is some onus on the maintainers of a project too, in the sense that, if possible, automate a lot of these things. Part of the thing to remember when you're in open source is that most of the interactions are asynchronous, through issues and pull requests, and you want to avoid that "I tried this, it didn't work. What else did you try?" back-and-forth. There's a lot of stuff you can put in place to prevent a lot of those questions, like "Why am I getting this?" There are typical things that are table stakes for a lot of projects now, like linting, and if you're using TypeScript, you can prevent...
00:22:07 - Anthony Campolo
What do we think of pre-commit hooks?
00:22:09 - Nick Taylor
Oh yeah, I know some people hate them. I am pro them, and I know Theo has strong opinions about not liking them. But in open source, at least, when I was at DEV.to, I was pretty much the only front-end person for like a year and a half, and all I had on my brain all the time was codebase maintenance. So for me, having those hooks in place was... Yeah, I see Dev give it the thumbs down.
00:22:41 - Anthony Campolo
Thumbs down if he wants to come defend his decision.
00:22:45 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess if you want to take a level-headed approach, if the stuff you have in place is actually slowing people down a lot, then maybe not. But from my usage of them, I've never had slow issues or anything. And I know people can say, "Well, I need to get this in, I need to ship this, and I'm getting a lint error or the TypeScript type is giving an error," obviously.
00:23:17 - Anthony Campolo
Can you dig into this? Because this is a really technical thing, but I think we have a technical audience. What would you include in a canonical pre-commit? What do you think is a good thing to actually have happen in the pre-commit?
00:23:29 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, so stuff like Prettier for sure. And I run that on all the files that make sense, including Markdown. You can obviously prevent some files from being treated with these things. You don't want to run Prettier on your package JSON or package lock or your Bun lock file, because that's binary, or a yarn lock. You don't want it running on stuff like that because it's just not necessary, and when you install something, it just gets updated automatically.
00:23:59 - Anthony Campolo
But yeah, your package manager should do that, right?
00:24:02 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, exactly. But I would definitely, because most people are using Markdown, especially in open source, run Prettier on Markdown. I would run Prettier on JS, TS, TSX files, or whatever framework you're using, if it's Svelte files or whatever.
00:24:20 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, that's pretty lightweight because that's just formatting. And I think, with Dev and Theo, they're arguing more so that you don't want to be making large modifications to the code. Is that kind of your thought, Dev?
00:24:37 - Nick Taylor
Yeah.
00:24:38 - Dev Agrawal
Wait, are we still talking about pre-commit hooks?
00:24:40 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, yeah. I'll just mention something else before Dev speaks, though. The only other thing I include is that I run tests, but only on the affected files, so it's not running all the tests. And if you use something like Jest or Vitest, you can say, "Only run the tests associated to these files." For sure, you can. And there's a whole other conversation about running these things on CI that we can talk about too. But I just wanted to mention it. That's pretty much the main thing I use in a pre-commit hook, and I'll let Dev go ahead.
00:25:13 - Dev Agrawal
Yeah, no, I don't really have much to say. I'll just say that I try to do most checks and linting stuff in my IDE or in CI. Other than that, I just don't like things blocking when I'm trying to push. If I can do it in...
00:25:32 - Anthony Campolo
My IDE, you know, to do those things. What about people who don't know to do those things?
00:25:38 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, I don't know.
00:25:39 - Dev Agrawal
I would hope that if my teammates had the Prettier—yes, the lint VS Code extensions—installed, so that while they're working on it, they can see those things immediately and not have to wait for [unclear].
00:25:53 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, this is really interesting because I think it's about context. Are we talking about the context of a professional team, or are we talking about the context of an open source project that anyone can contribute to?
00:26:03 - Dev Agrawal
That's fair. Yeah, I haven't worked on too many direct open source projects, so that's a big gap in my experience, I would say.
00:26:11 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, that's where I would make the argument for pre-commit hooks. It's one thing, because I've worked at places where, back in the day before VS Code was kind of a standard thing, I started using it, but they said, "No, we all use JetBrains WebStorm, so you've got to use that." So all the tooling was uniform. You didn't have to worry about this. But in the case of an open source project, chances are most people are using VS Code, but there are definitely people using Vim or other editors, and there's no way to guarantee they're configured to do all the things you were talking about here. That's why I think they're important. And I get back to the maintainability of the code because obviously something not being formatted correctly is not going to affect a production release. But over time, these things add up. It took me a year and a half to get rid of lint errors at DEV.to. I literally created this overarching issue and just started creating issues, and people like me and the community worked through them. It took literally like a year because I didn't enable it by default, but I just set it to give warnings until we got rid of them all.
00:27:27 - Nick Taylor
And then once we finally got rid of them all, I battened down the hatches and set it to error if any lint errors happened. And again, that might seem like a trivial thing, but it's the maintenance and the uniformity of things. I just think it makes sense, especially when you don't know what people's environments are.
00:27:50 - Dev Agrawal
Yeah, I can imagine that in an open source context you would want the person who's contributing to use their resources instead of running CI every single time someone contributes.
00:28:06 - Anthony Campolo
Okay, so we're about 30 minutes in and we have not said yet what Open Sauced is, I don't think. Why don't we do a baseline? What is this thing? Either Becca, Nick, or both. You can both give your pitch for it if you want.
00:28:21 - Nick Taylor
I'll ask if you want to, Becca. If you want to, go ahead. I can definitely do it as well, but I feel like you'll probably explain it better, even though I work on the product.
00:28:31 - Becca
No, no, that's fine. So Open Sauced is a product that's meant to empower everybody that's involved in open source, whether you're a contributor, a maintainer, or a team. We are creating tools that provide insight into the process so you can dig a little deeper and understand things like: how healthy is the project, or how healthy is my involvement in open source as a contributor? It really allows you to see what's going on in these projects, what's going on with contributors, and how we can create a healthy ecosystem with that knowledge.
00:29:07 - Nick Taylor
Awesome.
00:29:08 - Anthony Campolo
Do you want to add to that, Nick? What I always heard Brian say, because he's done this before, is that he used to build Yelp for X. He once built Yelp for churches. And he said this is like Yelp for open source. He probably doesn't use that pitch anymore, but back in the day he used to say that.
00:29:30 - Becca
Yeah, I mean, I like to think of it this way. I really like screenplays and screenwriting. My brothers and I used to write a lot together. It's similar to IMDb, right? You can look at movies, you can look at companies on IMDb and learn about them. But you can also learn about the individual actors. Where are they acting? What other movies are they in? Do those movies have good ratings? You're able to get all of this knowledge and information that helps you have a broader understanding of all that.
00:29:59 - Anthony Campolo
So that's actually much better than Yelp, because with the actor comparison, this is something that is not just useful for projects, it's useful for individuals as well.
00:30:12 - Becca
Yeah, 100%.
00:30:14 - Fuzzy
Yeah.
00:30:14 - Nick Taylor
And I linked to our docs that give an explainer on what Open Sauced is. I think because I'm on desktop, I can't pin it to the jumbotron. I know when you're on mobile, you can pin it.
00:30:24 - Anthony Campolo
I got it. Okay, cool.
00:30:26 - Nick Taylor
But, yeah, no, Becca did a great job.
00:30:28 - Anthony Campolo
Wait, how are you speaking if you're on desktop?
00:30:30 - Nick Taylor
I'm using just Twitter in my browser.
00:30:35 - Anthony Campolo
You can do that now?
00:30:36 - Nick Taylor
It's been like that.
00:30:37 - Dev Agrawal
Yeah, that's what I'm on.
00:30:39 - Becca
A couple months ago, I think.
00:30:40 - Nick Taylor
I'm picturing Anthony in a corner holding his phone.
00:30:46 - Anthony Campolo
I am. I had no idea this was a thing. I've been out of it the last couple months, apparently.
00:30:52 - Nick Taylor
Yeah. I don't know when they added it, but it's definitely.
00:30:55 - Anthony Campolo
No wonder all your audio sounds so clean.
00:30:57 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I've got my background noise AI stuff on because I have a contractor here right now literally hammering cement, which you can't hear, I don't think. Shout out to Krisp AI.
00:31:12 - Fuzzy
But.
00:31:12 - Nick Taylor
Not that they're sponsoring anything, but it's really good. But yeah, to Becca's point, we really do want to empower people, whether that's maintainers or teams. And like you were alluding to, Anthony, you can use it as a place to showcase what you've been working on. If people are proud of some work they did, they can create a highlight. They have a...
00:31:36 - Anthony Campolo
They.
00:31:36 - Nick Taylor
They can create their own profile. There's a dev card you can share. There are other things you can do too. And we obviously have a paid tier as well for enterprise or paying customers, but for somebody who's just interested in the platform, go ahead, check it out. You can have a profile as an individual and you can create some lists. Maybe if you're interested in the Framework ecosystem, you could create a list and see what they're up to. There's some newer work. This is more related to paying customers, but this is kind of because you were asking me the other day about some technical stuff I was working on. I've been focused mainly on the front end. That's pretty much what I'm doing at Open Sauced right now, because we're a very small engineering team and we're all full stack, but...
00:32:34 - Anthony Campolo
What is the stack? I'm assuming React.
00:32:37 - Nick Taylor
Yeah.
00:32:38 - Anthony Campolo
And GraphQL still? Is the GraphQL still in there?
00:32:40 - Nick Taylor
No. I mean, there's GraphQL in the sense that you're hitting the GitHub API, but the stack is Next.js. We're still using the Pages router. We're using Tailwind and TypeScript. We use NestJS for our API.
00:32:58 - Anthony Campolo
And I don't know if you know this, but do you know the project OneGraph? It doesn't even exist anymore.
00:33:04 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, they got acquired by netlify.
00:33:08 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. This whole thing was built on OneGraph, with B. Dougie and Sean just pair programming four years ago. Yeah, it was all GraphQL.
00:33:18 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, no, it's a REST API now. And aside from that, we use the GitHub API, but we're using it as a REST API. So yeah, it's all REST. Tailwind, like I mentioned. We're using Radix for components. ShadCN stuff's pretty neat. I pulled in some stuff where we're using some tables. We're in the process of updating some stuff in the app, but some of the tables in the application aren't really responsive because they're divs. So some of the new stuff I've done uses old-school HTML tables, but CSS is so much better these days that they actually look good.
00:34:04 - Anthony Campolo
But no more floats.
00:34:06 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, but the big work I've been working on has been this workspaces feature, and it comes with a UI refresh as well. If folks have already been to Open Sauced, you have a top navigation with the workspaces. And to be clear, some of the stuff I mentioned is for enterprise or paying customers, but once we flip the switch on this, because it's behind a feature flag right now, everybody's going to get a personal workspace. So you can still do the stuff you were doing in Open Sauced. I think for individuals it'll just look more like a UI refresh, but they will have a workspace.
00:34:48 - Anthony Campolo
And yeah, so this is a question for both you guys. If someone was getting started, like I go to your repo and see there's app, hot, API, there's a lot of links. How should someone get started in this journey? Should they just go to the dashboard and log in?
00:35:07 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, definitely creating an account. But I might let Becca speak to some of this because we have a bunch of repositories that help people kind of onboard into open source. They're open source repositories, but we have these paths to help people get started because there are a lot of people coming into open source for the first time. So we have some paths to help people there. I don't know if you want to speak to that.
00:35:35 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, yeah, I'd love to learn more about that.
00:35:37 - Becca
Yeah, sure. So one of the things we've spent a lot of time thinking about is deliberately planning this contributor journey because we want to be able to empower people to contribute to open source. And like we were talking about earlier, one of the big challenges is maintainer burnout. We have a lot of people saying, "Go contribute to open source," and you were talking about the spray-and-pray method. There are repositories out there that are open to beginners and are friendly to doing more mentoring or hand-holding through the process. I think it's important to remember that there are some repositories where it's fine just to contribute once and move on, because the purpose is to contribute once and move on. And that's kind of what we have started here. So we have an Intro to Open Source course, and in chapter five it walks you through how to get your first contribution. That's to our repository called the Guestbook. And now that's done through a CLI tool, so there's not even that much you have to do other than use the commands that are laid out for you in the course.
00:36:48 - Becca
And so that's kind of step one, just to get people a little bit... get their feet wet. Toes wet was the expression. I'm so bad at it.
00:36:57 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, yeah, we can go with wet toes. We can do wet toes.
00:37:00 - Becca
I guess wet toes. If they want to get their knees wet, they move over to the Pizza Verse repository. This is another fun repository just to help people understand how do you clone a project, what does it mean to fork, what's writing a good commit message. And basically there are three issues pinned to the top of the repository: add a fun fact about pizza, add a pizza recipe, and there's another pizza-related thing. But I think we're going to expand that because not everybody has pizza in their country. So we want to make it a bit more culturally inclusive. I think there was somebody who told me they didn't know what pizza was, and it like...
00:37:46 - Anthony Campolo
You know, five years ago, that would have been the saddest thing I've ever heard, someone saying they don't know what pizza is.
00:37:51 - Dev Agrawal
OpenSauce curry, five years ago.
00:37:55 - Becca
Yeah, Nick is gonna add poutine pizza on there for Canada.
00:37:59 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, yeah,
00:38:01 - Becca
But so you're just trying all of these things, right, to make it an inclusive space. So that's kind of our beginner-friendly thing. And from there, we have issues usually in the docs repository or in the app or one of our other ones that have a beginner or good first issue or beginner-friendly tag or something like that, where we try to make it really detailed and structured so people can continue on that path. We try very hard to make that a path that everyone can follow and grow through in a really gentle way. Of course it's going to be challenging because anytime you're learning something new, it's hard. But once you've done it a handful of times and start to get used to the process, it becomes easier along the way.
00:38:52 - Fuzzy
Yeah.
00:38:52 - Nick Taylor
And a side note, Dev was talking about curry, but there's a lot of really good Indian... well, there's all kinds in Montreal. Where I'm at is super multicultural and there's so much great food. And I've actually had butter chicken pizza, and it's amazing.
00:39:09 - Dev Agrawal
What the...
00:39:11 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, it's really good. So just throwing that out there. Maybe instead of a poutine one, I might put a butter chicken pizza in the Pizza Verse.
00:39:28 - Anthony Campolo
That's so great. I feel like all this just goes back to the TLD, the .pizza domain. It has such a pull.
00:39:38 - Fuzzy
Sorry, I just want to say, Dev, we have chicken tikka masala pizzas here in Glasgow, bro.
00:39:43 - Nick Taylor
Oh, nice. Another reason to go to Scotland.
00:39:47 - Dev Agrawal
Another reason not to go to Scotland.
00:39:48 - Fuzzy
What do you mean?
00:39:51 - Dev Agrawal
That doesn't sound good. That sounds hard. Why would I want to try that?
00:39:55 - Fuzzy
I don't know.
00:39:56 - Nick Taylor
I don't know.
00:39:56 - Fuzzy
That's amazing. You have no idea. It's so good.
00:40:01 - Nick Taylor
I haven't had lunch, and all this pizza talk is making me feel like just walking out the door after this and going to get some butter chicken pizza.
00:40:11 - Anthony Campolo
My partner actually got some Indian food for lunch and got me some. It's in the fridge waiting for me.
00:40:18 - Nick Taylor
That's awesome.
00:40:18 - Anthony Campolo
All right.
00:40:18 - Dev Agrawal
I guess I got to try some of this.
00:40:21 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, yeah.
00:40:21 - Dev Agrawal
Indian-cuisine pizza at some point.
00:40:25 - Fuzzy
It's called multiculturalism.
00:40:26 - Nick Taylor
Yeah. I love it when there's fusion food. Well, this one's not really fusion, but buffalo chicken pizza is really good too, though that's not really fusion.
00:40:38 - Fuzzy
That's.
00:40:39 - Anthony Campolo
Well, yes, definitely. But actually, when I was in Italy, we had anchovies for the first time, and we loved them, so we tried anchovies on pizza, which I know is considered a total faux pas for some people, but it was pretty good.
00:40:57 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, I think I've had anchovies on pizza, but it's not my go-to. It doesn't taste terrible, though.
00:41:05 - Anthony Campolo
But yeah, that just reminds me, there's a Futurama episode where Fry wants to have anchovies, but anchovies have been extinct for like 500 years. So he finds the last can of anchovies that exists and puts them on the pizza, and everyone has it and they're all like, "Oh, that's terrible." He's like, "Yeah, you know, they grow on you." But that was the only can in existence.
00:41:29 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, yeah, I see Toby's in the crowd there. Hey, Toby.
00:41:33 - Anthony Campolo
What's up, Toby? Yeah, and both you and I, and possibly other people here, have been invited to this big Million launch party. So that's cool.
00:41:42 - Nick Taylor
Yeah.
00:41:43 - Anthony Campolo
Million 3.0.
00:41:44 - Nick Taylor
Yeah. Excited for that on Friday.
00:41:46 - Anthony Campolo
I haven't.
00:41:46 - Nick Taylor
Oh yeah. Toby, you got to get Fuzzy in there, otherwise this Twitter space is going to get awkward real fast.
00:41:55 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I wasn't sure. That's why I left it open. I'm sure with this group of people he invited someone else here.
00:42:03 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, yeah. I'm happy to keep talking about Open Sauced, obviously, but I'm curious because, Fuzzy, you have a pretty cool background. You were on the Astro core team, and now are you at the Linux Foundation now? I can't remember where you've moved on to.
00:42:20 - Anthony Campolo
That's right. Yeah, he was just talking about it. He just met with the whole team. It was an in-person kind of conference.
00:42:27 - Nick Taylor
Oh, that's cool.
00:42:31 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, Fuzzy had told me a while ago he had to dip, but it seems like he's still here. So I'm not sure if you have bandwidth to speak. But we also just got Toby up here as well. So I'd love to get just a tiny pitch on the Million 3 launch party, and then we can talk a little more Open Sauced and close out around the hour.
00:42:50 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, cool, sounds good.
00:42:52 - Fuzzy
Sorry. Hi, sorry about that, Nick. I was reconnecting to a better network just when you were asking me a question there.
00:43:00 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. So Nick was asking you about the Linux Foundation. Yeah.
00:43:06 - Fuzzy
So I'm kind of involved with a small little group of friends working to help the Security Knowledge Framework, which is a great resource of tools to help you become somewhat better, you know, security-aware. And so it got brought underneath the LF umbrella. We got scooped up into the process, and it's just been an amazing ride for the past year. So I've kind of not been as heavily involved with the Astro community as I should be. I had to take a step back from all those roles. But what we're looking to do at the LF is pretty much bring tools to help train the future of developers, developers who are both security proficient, who are taught the best practices, and also able to use those skills in enterprise use cases. What I found is that there's a huge leap between what we do in the open source communities around the JavaScript ecosystem, where we're often seen as the indie group, the independents, the free radicals in a sense, and then enterprise and how those guys operate.
00:44:38 - Fuzzy
There is a difference between the two, and a lot of it is mindset. A lot is proficiencies, and a lot is skills training, because if you don't have those skills and you don't have them credited and you're not able to display and certify, say, "I'm certified in Kubernetes," nobody's going to let you near their stack in enterprise. There are a number of different things that work against you, and it's one of those where we say, "Oh, you don't really need to go for certifications." I'm honestly in the school of thought now that certification is important to the developer, as important as your open source contributions, if not more, because those certifications are what's going to give companies the ability to say, "Listen, you're credible, you're competent, and you're not that much of a security risk, not that much of an insurance risk." The risk factor of me hiring you goes down because you have demonstrated and gotten accreditations in this particular project. So that's what I'm kind of working on in the LF.
00:46:02 - Fuzzy
But yeah, very cool.
00:46:06 - Anthony Campolo
Do you want to follow up on that, Nick?
00:46:08 - Nick Taylor
Oh no, I was saying that's cool because I wasn't sure. I can't remember when he left the Astro team, but I couldn't remember where he had gone to. So it sounds cool what you've been up to.
00:46:17 - Fuzzy
So yeah, dude, honestly, can I just say, always bet on open source, Open Sauced, right? Open source as an economic movement is not just specific to GitHub and repos. If you were to look at it from 30,000 feet, you see a growing, vibrant culture where people are readily contributing and proactively engaging with different initiatives. As open as democracy can be in a virtual environment setting as well, it is more of an economic force and a movement than it is really just GitHub and repos.
00:47:07 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I mean, you're really lucky where you're at because I think people who have gotten into this maybe within the last five years or so, it's hard to understand just how important Linux was to open source. We all think of GitHub and stuff, but Linux was the open source project that made open source important.
00:47:33 - Fuzzy
Yes. And what I discovered when I was at the All Hands last week was really the history of it all. I was sitting next to Mike Rochester and Clyde Separate Speed, my boss and his boss, which was very funny and awkward. They were telling me about how the LF came to be and how it started off with a group of three to a group of 12 to a group of 50, and how it kept growing and then all of a sudden became this juggernaut it is today. And juggernaut is a good way to describe it now, because it's becoming the advocacy group that is meant to represent open source in the lobbies and around the EU and around the US government, helping to influence some of the narrative that applies to us developers and the open source communities. So it's really starting to become a juggernaut in that sense. And as I said to Anthony earlier, the Linux Foundation is like the janitor of open source in a sense.
00:48:45 - Fuzzy
And you're right, dude, if it wasn't for Linux... It's a great project. It's huge, diverse. I mean, the amount of distros that are there. There is not just one operating system.
00:49:04 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. And I think really just the idea of open sourcing an operating system itself, that was it. Because if you can't own your operating system, you don't own anything. You can build as much open source stuff as you want, but if it's built on a proprietary platform at the base layer, you never really know what you're doing. You never really know whether your code is doing what you want it to do or not. This is why, with Microsoft, you were just praying they wouldn't fuck you. You were like, "Okay, well, I hope they're not backdooring my entire system." But I don't know. And with Linux, you actually could have that kind of peace of mind, of course.
00:49:46 - Fuzzy
And you had it on the head. During the '80s and '90s, there was a pushback toward proprietary code. Everything was proprietary code, and sometimes the license fees were just exorbitant, to the point where in order for me to be in business I needed to pay to maintain another business, in a sense. And it was just becoming unfeasible. One can say probably the nature of open source would emerge even if it wasn't for Linux, but that's an argument for another multiverse, right? However...
00:50:32 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, this is a super interesting conversation, but I want to pivot because we got Toby up here and he hasn't gotten to speak yet. So Toby, introduce yourself. Tell us about Million 3.
00:50:45 - Tobiloba
Awesome, awesome. Hello everyone. Really awesome people in the house. Anthony, Becca, Nick, Dev, Andre, Jason, and J. I see everyone here, very familiar faces. Yeah, excited for you guys to actually jam with us on Friday by 8 CST. I hope I got the time right. It's really late here for me by that time. But yeah, Million version 3 is dropping on that day, and we have so many cool features coming in and a lot of fixes as well in the major release. Definitely the compiler... there are a lot of new features added to the compiler. It's smarter now, and some limitations we had before using Million have been overcome in the new release.
00:51:43 - Fuzzy
Drop in.
00:51:44 - Tobiloba
We have a linter as well, but I'm not going to say much on that because I want you to experience that firsthand. And yeah, there's one really exciting thing that's dropping as well. It's for the users of Million to see how much the performance has improved in a very massive way. That one I'll still put a cap on so that you can see it firsthand as well. And yeah, a lot of other cool features that maybe I'm not even thinking about right now, but most are centered around a faster runtime to help your applications run faster and everything. And yeah, I hope I'm not saying too much or too little.
00:52:35 - Anthony Campolo
Well, that's been sufficiently vague. And I love this. So I want to try and pull all these threads together. We got Toby here, Nick, and Becca. How would you pitch Toby on the value of Open Sauced for Million?
00:52:58 - Nick Taylor
I think Becca might be tied up because I messaged her in Slack. But I think, like any other project, you can use it to... there's the individual aspect of Open Sauced, but as an open source project it could be valuable in the sense that you might want to track how many people have forked the repository, some metrics on health, how many new contributors there are, how many returning contributors.
00:53:31 - Anthony Campolo
Million's a project that's blown up all the time, so it sounds like helping with influx could be a thing.
00:53:38 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, and if you happen to be seeing 50 new people contributed this week, who are these people? Then you can kind of see what they're up to. I think just seeing the health of the repository... you can always go by vibe-driven statistics, I guess, but it's good to see concrete numbers. Like, okay, wow, we had 200 pull requests over the last two months, or 30 days, and they all got merged, or a ton of issues got opened and stuff got resolved. It's cool to see stars in repos, and a lot of people go based on star-driven hype. And don't get me wrong, stars are a metric, but I don't think it's the only metric. It's the top-level metric.
00:54:38 - Anthony Campolo
But a top-level metric is like a company's stock. It gives you information, but it certainly doesn't give you all the information.
00:54:47 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, and it doesn't guarantee that a project is amazing. But the other thing too is, B. Dougie and I were talking a while ago, and jQuery still ships new features. I don't know how many stars it has.
00:55:12 - Anthony Campolo
jQuery 4, it's coming.
00:55:13 - Nick Taylor
But there could be projects that have been around forever where you see, okay, this project has 60,000 stars, but maybe there have been no new stars in the past five years for whatever reason. You kind of want to see more current stats on things and get a more realistic view of what's happened in the past six months on the project versus over...
00:55:40 - Anthony Campolo
I have a perfect example of this, actually. So I was checking out this YouTube-DL tool. It's for downloading YouTube videos. It's a CLI. It's got like a hundred thousand stars and it hasn't been updated in like two years. And there's a fork with half as many stars. I tried both of them. The one with a hundred thousand stars took me about ten minutes to download a YouTube video, and with the currently maintained project it took five seconds. So that's a perfect example. The stars lead you in the wrong direction there.
00:56:14 - Nick Taylor
Yeah. In some cases, the stars are more historical than about what's actually happening. People can still star a repo, obviously. But it'd be interesting to see, even for React or Vue, they've got tens of thousands of stars, but how many stars have they gotten this year, or in the last three months? Those are both healthy projects, so maybe that's a bad example, unless you want to get spicy about React releases. But that's a whole other topic I don't want to get into now. I think that's the main thing. It's kind of like I equate the stars thing to, "Hey, yeah, man, we won the football championship in high school. Remember that? We were champions." Sure you were, but what's happening now that you're 20 years older? I don't know if that's a good analogy or not.
00:57:21 - Tobiloba
I think this is a very interesting conversation, and it seems like a lot of conversations and discussions have gone down around this. I'll probably listen to the recording here too, to clarify. But yeah, you did make some very valid points there, Nick, and I agree with you. Yeah, sorry, go ahead.
00:57:40 - Becca
Yeah, sorry, I had to step away from the space for a second to check dinner, and that's right when you asked me about this. But I think Nick did a really good job talking about all of these things, and I dropped the link in there. So I created a Million JS insight page real quick that you should be able to see. It gives you a little bit more data on what you're looking at. One of the things I see when I look at the contributors graph is we've got one person committing the majority of the code, right? One of the nice things about visualizations like this is, okay, you get to see how many people... Actually, I think I know some of those faces on there. Yeah, I do. I see Jeffrey in there. Anyway, you get to see who the people are that are contributing here and how often they're contributing. If you see a decrease over time, then you know, okay, there's an issue.
00:58:37 - Becca
Do I need to be doing something differently? Why is there an issue? And you think about things like the bus factor. So the bus factor is, if somebody gets hit by a bus, is it going to take out my entire project? I didn't make that up. I'm not the one who said it, so don't blame me for the terrible, violent analogy. But if you look at this contributor graph here, we've got one person making the majority of the commits, right? So if something happens to that person, then what is going to happen to the project? And then it also lets you see... I also created a contributor chart. You can break down and look at those 21 contributors who have contributed to Million JS in the last month. Where else are they contributing to? It's interesting to see what the connections are, who they're connected to, and if you want to grow the project or increase the health of your project, who can you reach out to in that space? That allows you to have a broader understanding of who your community is.
00:59:42 - Becca
And this is kind of an aside, but when I talk to people about trying to find a job in tech, I tell them, remember, your network is not just the people you know, it's the people you know and who they know as well. And the same thing applies to open source. So if you are looking for help or support or you need somebody with a certain expertise, then you know all of these people, and they know all of these projects and all of these other people there. So it allows you to understand things and also compare yourself to other projects as well. If you see that your PR velocity is pretty slow, which Million JS isn't, you're at 73%, so I would give you a thumbs up for that one.
01:00:24 - Anthony Campolo
Killing the game.
01:00:26 - Becca
But if you see that it goes from 73% now to, I don't know, 50% in a month or two, then you can ask yourself, "Okay, what is the problem?" Actually, you've gotten better. So I will say in a three-month period the PR velocity was 69%, and then in the last 30 days it's 73%. So kudos to you for improving. But all of these things are part of open source health that you might not be thinking of because there's not another place where we see information like this.
01:01:00 - Nick Taylor
You forgot to do that. You forgot to do the mic drop.
01:01:05 - Anthony Campolo
That was an awesome pitch. I love that you included the link even, so you can check that out.
01:01:12 - Fuzzy
That was probably... Becca, can I just say something, right, just to...
01:01:15 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, no, go for it.
01:01:17 - Fuzzy
To help with the picture, weave it right, the elevator pitch: short, concise, and sweet. You're basically providing a data-driven approach to open source projects, delivering better insights into their projects and what they get through GitHub. And can I just ask a quick question to either you or Nick? Do you provide historic data in terms of month-on-month comparison between different data points?
01:01:58 - Nick Taylor
We recently... this part isn't open source, but we were using a time-series database. Now...
01:02:06 - Anthony Campolo
which one?
01:02:08 - Nick Taylor
I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say, but I mean...
01:02:13 - Anthony Campolo
I think it's, "DM it to me." I'm curious. You can keep it.
01:02:16 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, I mean, I think there are hints to what it is in the codebase, so it's probably not a big deal, but I'm just going to cover my tracks just in case.
01:02:25 - Anthony Campolo
You're good. Yeah, yeah.
01:02:26 - Nick Taylor
So basically you can track pretty much anything, and it's in pretty much real time. Not all of this is in production yet, but it's definitely given a boost to us. I just have to mention that Becca's got to jump off. We have an API meeting.
01:02:49 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I was gonna say, if people have a hard stop at the hour, feel free to hop off. Anyone who wants to stay, we can keep chatting.
01:02:56 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, I'll stay on for a few more minutes. I'm just going to let her know that I'll be in the meeting in a few minutes. So yeah, we have a time-series database, and this makes it nice with these time buckets where, and again, not all of this is in production yet, and I think some of it might only be on our beta, but you can get information really quickly, real-time data about GitHub. So if you want metrics on health, you can get it over seven days, 30 days, three months. I don't know if we've done a per-day view. I think that's what you're asking, Fuzzy. But if not, I'm pretty sure that stuff's all possible.
01:03:42 - Fuzzy
It was. What I found, when it came to a use case, Nick, was when I was doing the Astro stuff like This Week in Astro, getting the weekly data, I was having to store it myself.
01:03:56 - Nick Taylor
Okay.
01:03:57 - Fuzzy
Each week, just so that way you'd actually collate the data and then find the deltas between the weekly differences. GitHub doesn't give you the ability to go back in time and have that data recorded. That was just something I was wondering about because that would be a really, really good and powerful use case and feature as well.
01:04:24 - Nick Taylor
Right now we can go back a year with the time-series database, which I think if you were an enterprise client, we could definitely open something up to go back further than a year. But I think a year makes a lot of sense because a lot changes in a year. And going back in the historical data like... yeah, exactly. If you said, "What did the Astro codebase look like in 2017, or who was contributing?" it might be fun for nostalgia or for the people that do documentaries. But I think for the day—
01:05:09 - Anthony Campolo
to-day stuff, dude, I would love an Astro doc.
01:05:13 - Nick Taylor
Oh my God, you heard it here first.
01:05:16 - Fuzzy
Oh, geez, seriously. Yeah, but I'd be interested in that as well.
01:05:20 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, but I think for now we've kind of landed on one year of real-time data as a good spot for most things. And right now, if you go to that page, we filter by seven days, 30 days, or three months. But I do like that. So the use case you'd be looking for is what happened this week and what happened two weeks later, and compare...
01:05:48 - Fuzzy
Yeah.
01:05:49 - Nick Taylor
Okay.
01:05:49 - Fuzzy
Yeah, pretty much. Like month-on-month, week-on-week kind of comparisons.
01:05:53 - Nick Taylor
Yeah, yeah.
01:05:53 - Fuzzy
It's like, data is meant to drive insights, and the more insights you can deliver for your customers and your users, the more powerful your data-driven approach becomes. That's all I can say. I wish you all the very best.
01:06:11 - Nick Taylor
Oh thanks.
01:06:12 - Anthony Campolo
That's awesome. I want to give Toby a chance to respond if he has any thoughts, and then we'll go around and everyone can give their "check my links out," and then we'll close it out here. Do you have anything to add, Toby?
01:06:27 - Tobiloba
Yeah, actually on the topic of using open source as a way to evolve into a top 1% dev or something, I have so many thoughts regarding that because from my perspective I'm of the opinion that working or contributing in open source is not a bad thing. I've actually seen now that, after doing open source for a very long while, it's not a necessity, really. But doing open source is definitely a good plus for you as a person because it gives you the opportunity to work with several devs, and that stage to be able to connect with several people and learn for yourself and improve as well is definitely a good plus. The ecosystem is very rich and supportive. So in that regard, people in open source definitely get so many benefits from there. But it shouldn't be a preamble, or a reason for somebody to be expecting, "Oh, I've done so much open source now. Where's my job? Where's my full-time remote job?" or something like that.
01:07:51 - Tobiloba
So I guess that's one thing that I just wanted to give my opinion on. And I also checked out Open Sauced, shout out to Open Sauced and the entire team, B. Dougie, Nick, Becca. You guys are doing really amazing work. Yeah. Shout out to JS Jam as well.
01:08:09 - Anthony Campolo
Awesome, man. Yeah. And for everyone out in the crowd, please smash those faces and start following. Let's get just. Let's do Fuzzy Dev and then Nick, if you want people to follow anything, do you have anything fuzzy you want to point people to?
01:08:26 - Fuzzy
Always Astro. Just check it out if you haven't. That's Astro.build. Secondly, I follow what Toby said: always bet on open source, and never take anything for granted.
01:08:46 - Anthony Campolo
Very cool. Deb, I believe you work for some sort of authentication company. Are you still here?
01:08:56 - Dev Agrawal
Do I? Yeah, I kind of do. Check out Clerk.com or Clerk.dev if you're building JavaScript.
01:09:05 - Anthony Campolo
Or clerk.dave.
01:09:09 - Dev Agrawal
Close enough. I wish. If you're building a project, especially a JavaScript project, and you want auth to never be a problem for you, check out Clerk.
01:09:22 - Anthony Campolo
Awesome. Then Nicky T., you should pitch both Open Sauced and your stream.
01:09:28 - Nick Taylor
Yeah. Thanks again for having me on, Anthony. If folks are interested, just check out OpenSauced.pizza. Go create a profile if you want. It's free, and you can set up and do some highlights of stuff you've been doing in open source. Explore the platform. It's all open source. It's on GitHub at OpenSauced. That's the org, and you can see all the repositories there. And yeah, if folks are interested, I mainly stream on Twitch. You can go to NickiT Live. I stream on other places too. Like I was on the CFE.dev YouTube this afternoon actually streaming Astro, Fuzzy. So yeah, if folks want to give a follow there. Aside from that, I do have to... but thanks so much for having me on.
01:10:20 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, thank you so much. What's up, Toby?
01:10:23 - Tobiloba
Yeah, I was going to say that actually I'm subscribed to Brian's newsletter. So I got the notification for when Nick was streaming. I was like, "Wow, this is awesome." Nice one, Nick.
01:10:37 - Anthony Campolo
It's all connected, man. If I was Charlie, I could draw all these strings. I know all these people have been in all the places. CFE is a good place to be. The Jamstack newsletter is a good newsletter to read, and please check out JavaScriptJam.com. We didn't talk about the newsletter at all, but that's probably okay. We had much better things to talk about. So thank you to Nick and Becca for joining us. Thank you to Fuzzy, thank you to Toby, thank you to Dev. I really appreciate you guys jumping up. You make the show what it is, so good.