7 posts tagged with "opensource"

I recently got to hang with the creator of Valibot, Fabian Hiller on a live stream. We discussed its history of the project and did some live coding with Valibot. Let’s dig in.

As developers, it’s in our best interest to automate things. The less we have to do in a manual way, the better. As soon as manual intervention is required, there is potential for failure or a mishap. Aside from that, it’s your time as a maintainer that could be spent elsewhere.

As a maintainer of a repository, it’s in your best interest to automate processes as much as possible. The CODEOWNERS file is one of those tools to help with automating processes.

Maybe I’m biased because I spent ten years teaching college English before coming into tech. Or maybe it’s because I’ve seen projects fail because of poor documentation. Whatever the reason, I believe that documentation plays a huge role in the success and growth of an open source project. Effective documentation empowers developers to understand and utilize the project as well as fosters adoption, creates user satisfaction, and allows for a more seamless collaboration within the community. In order to ensure that happens, we need to understand the significance of documentation in open source along with best practices for creating comprehensive and accessible documentation.

As data intensive backend applications scale and grow, with larger data sets scaled out to higher availability, performance bottlenecks can quickly become major hurdles. Processing requests that once took mere milliseconds can suddenly become multi-minute problems.

In this blog post, let’s take a look at some recent optimization strategies the OpenSauced pizza micro-service recently underwent. This backend service is a Go server that processes git commits by request, sometimes processing thousands of commits in one single request. You can almost think of it as a real time batch processor that can be called by arbitrary clients to fetch and process git commits within an agnostic git repo.

These commits eventually are all indexed within a Postgres database. Most of these optimizations revolve around “batching” the Postgres calls instead of going one by one. For simplicity in our examples, we’ll be using an arbitrary table called “my_table” with data that fits into the “my_data” column. Let’s dive in and take a look at how we can optimize!

Over the last few weeks, the OpenSauced engineering team has been building a service we're calling the “pizza oven.” This service indexes commits within bespoke git repositories and can be used to generate insights based on those commits. This all gives us the ability to create interesting metrics around open source project velocity, “time to merge”, the who’s who of contributors, and more; all by indexing and parsing the git commits! We’ve been experimenting with many different models and have created an interesting solution for increased performance and availability of the service.

A couple of years ago, I got to see Neil Gaiman--the English author, creator, and creative genius--live. To say the experience was inspirational would be an understatement. There's something moving about hearing a person share their stories, listening to them read though. There's deeper meaning when you can see their expressions, the ways they move on the stage. You come out of the experience inspired to pursue the things you're passionate about. And it reminded me about an interview he gave a couple of years ago about his experience speaking about science fiction at the first-ever, state-sponsored science fiction convention.