We don’t have a lot to say here yet, but check back soon. We intend to keep a regularly updated chronicle of our adventures and might even have some insightful things to say every now and then!

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Posts

• The strength of community

  Everything’s been super hectic with the holidays and so nobody noticed that I didn’t post the last two weeks, right? I joke, but not really. We’ve been super busy too and not just with the regular holiday stuff. In between the celebrations and glühwein, we’ve been working on community building.

• Letting go of control

  Events of the last week have me thinking about something that’s true in a lot of contexts. A lot of people like to have control of a relationship; control of a situation; control of the message; or in this case, control of a community. I get it, realizing that you don’t have control can be unsettling. But in reality, not having control is the natural order of things and you’ll have a much better time of it once you realize that.

• Contributions of 'Ghost Engineers'

  Last week was Thanksgiving for the USA and while I don’t personally celebrate the holiday or the violent colonization it represents, it does encourage me to reflect back on some of the things I’m most thankful for. Once again, you won’t be surprised to hear that it’s people. Coworkers, friends, community members, industry professionals that I learn from and am inspired by every day. People that I’m lucky enough to collaborate with, which probably includes many of you reading this. People in my communities are what I’m thankful for.

• Future proofing open source

  We had a slight disagreement with our attorney while drafting our articles of incorporation and related documents. He’d used some very aggressive language around the ownership of intellectual property and whatnot. It was pretty standard lingo but it just rubbed us both the wrong way and we asked him to tone it down significantly. This prompted a long discussion about our open source business model. We talked about the ownership of open source contributions, both to our repositories and to those owned by Vox Pupuli or other community members. We talked about contributor license agreements (CLAs) and the fact that our business model involves more upstream contributions than internal development. We explained that any future employees would almost certainly be established open source contributors and that we didn’t believe it was ethical to try to claim ownership of their personal OSS work whether it was done on “work time” or not.

• Alpha community package availability

  Well, I’ve got some great news for you. Thanks to hard work by a few volunteers, we have alpha community-built packages up and the starts of a download mirror list, which you can find on the new “downloads” page. But let’s talk a bit before you go racing off to install and make sure you know what you’re dipping into.

• It was only a matter of time

  Well, it looks like they did it. Perforce has all but closed the Puppet source. To be fair, they didn’t actually change the license itself, but they’ve gone as far as they could and still remain compliant. They’re forking projects internally where all their development will happen and pinkie-swear promise that ….. eventually ….. that work will make it to the public repositories.

• A Flock of Flutter devs

  Flutter is a neat little UI toolkit allowing you to build applications targeting most major platforms. It started out mobile only, iOS and Android. Today it supports web and desktop too. I poked at it back in the day when I was considering some fun mobile app dev side projects. It made a pretty big splash initially, with a lot of community interest. Was it to be the fabled universal toolkit?

• Community stewardship matters

  Some years ago I got caught up in a very annoying conflict with James over r/puppet. I don’t remember if he’d created the space or not, but he’d been the sole moderator for years. He’d been doing an excellent job, but recently he’d been drifting away from the Puppet community and spending more of his time on his mgmt project. (Which is totally cool and you should check it out sometime.)

• Everything is on fire....

  I’ve been pretty quiet since leaving Puppet in July. And circumstances this week aren’t exactly how I wanted to pop my head up again and tell you what I was up to. I’ve done some private consulting with a few of y’all over the years, and had planned to expand on that. Check out the Services page for more information if you’re interested. But that’s not what I want to talk about today.