My story of becoming an open-source developer, with lessons learned.

1. The Life and Journey
of a
Professional Open-Source Developer
Bob McWhirter

2. Note!
At any point, ask
any questions
you want.

3. Director of Research & Prototyping
JBoss Middleware, Red Hat
Project co-lead of WildFly Swarm
At Red Hat for almost 10 years

4. How did I get here?

5. via open-source!

6. Studied theatre at
university
building scenery

8. Moved into graphic
design.
On paper.
Newsletters. Menus.
Business cards.

9. Remember, this was
1997

10. Then websites…
And someone wanted a
shopping cart.

11. WTF is cgi-bin?

12. And Apache?

13. Perl?
You’ve got to be
kidding me.

14. *sigh*

15. I’d done Apple //e
BASIC in 3rd grade

16. And Logo

17. Perl

18. C++

20. ACE
Washington University

21. Use.
Learn.
Find bugs.
Submit patch.

23. Makefiles
Not awesome. Not fast.

24. Academic writings are
form of open-source.

28. Wait, what happened to
my hammer?
Or menus? Or business
cards?
Or websites?

29. First
Software Engineering
Job

30. ACE iFleet
Giant
Build
Cluster
Bake
Bob

31. Hired!

32. Linux
Emacs
C++ Java
Loved Open-Source
Released Open-Source

33. werkflow
JDOM
dom4j
Jaxen XPath
jakarta-* (apache)

34. Second
Software Engineering
Job

35. CAPS Logistics

36. The Java Guy at a
DCOM shop.

37. Lots of free time.

39. • Business rules
• Heuristics for solving vehicle
routing & scheduling
• ILOG JRules was too expensive
• Lots of academic papers available

41. • Strong project leaders
• Autonomy
• Better tools (JIRA, Subversion)
• Commercial-friendly
• Not Apache Software Foundation

44. • Consulting around open-source
strategies
• Helped clients (JotSpot, BEA)
work with OSS communities

48. I missed engineering

49. TorqueBox
JRuby on JBossAS

50. Hire the JRuby guys

51. Microservices with WildFly

52. Lessons Learned:

53. Start with small
contributions.

54. Documentation and
bug reports are
contributions.

55. Contributing to
forums & lists
are contributions.

56. Implement from
specifications or RFCs.

57. Communication is
important.

58. Learn tools to
communicate across
space and time.

59. Good
bug reports

60. Good
commit messages

61. Good
emails

62. Friendliness is
important.

63. Scratch an itch.

64. Someone else probably
has the same itch.

65. Strong opinions,
Weakly held.

66. You can be a
commercial-friendly
open-source
zealot.

67. Continuous
self-promotion.

68. (like this today)

69. Champion others.

70. Open-source builds
reputation.

71. Closed-source jobs
make you “go dark”.

72. Open-source helps you
learn.

73. Open-source helps you
make connections.

74. At Red Hat, we hire
from the community.

75. Community is
everywhere.

76. To recap:

77. • You can learn via open-source
• You can improve via open-source
• You can make a career of open-source

78. Thank you!
Questions?