I am too young to remember the first day of eternal September personally. The idea goes like this though: in September 1993, an engineer at AOL flipped a flag and granted UseNet access to all AOL subscribers. It was a clever marketing move, UseNet was easily the largest online gathering at the time, spanning university and company networks, and containing a wealth of knowledge. If you’ve never used the service before, try to imagine a web forum with every topic you can possibly think of in a neatly arranged tree structure.

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.