Gil Yehuda’s Open Source Talk

Gil Yehuda’s open source talk was enlightening and extremely engaging. He ruminated much on the merits of delving into open source software not only for companies like Verizon Media but also for the individual software engineer and programmer. Through a series of attractive slides, sensible segways, and well-timed Q&A-ing, Gil painted a cohesive presentation that remained topical and amazingly informative. A couple of the great takeaways I had as an aspiring software engineer are:

• The Importance of Open Source in the Industry: Gil made no small point about how open source is a space that many businesses have embraced over the years. Despite the initial hostility toward open source, companies have managed to use open source as another means to produce value in their products, and of course as way to help generate money, the primary goal of any business. With this in mind, Gil stressed that having a background in open source goes a long way in helping one find a job, and on the flip side, help businesses find programmers.
• A Great Skill to Develop With Open Source: One way to use open source to help one find a job is to be able to use an open source platform to build another platform. This skill requires one to immerse themselves in and understand an open source platform, and shows that you have the programming ability to create out of what is already there, something that is super relevant in the industry as you’d be hard pressed to not find a pre-existing set of tools for some tasks already.

I especially loved when Gil was talking about how open source can be a great motivator for his development team at Verizon Media. Floating the possibility of open sourcing company code causing an influx of quality code and debugging due to the desire to present non-crappy work is a great example of the human aspect of open source. Because not only does open source cause this type of motivation for a developer team such as Verizon Media’s, the widely collaborative and public nature of open source is exactly why contributions to open source are collectively such high quality and lead to great work. And this brings us to…

The Cathedral vs. The Bazaar

These two disparate software development methodologies are both great in their own respect, but I am a much bigger fan of the sprawling Bazaar model over the contained Cathedral model.