I am looking for a new job. Elixir/erlang SWE and/or ops/SRE related. Size of the company does not matter. I have some ethical rules (gambling, blockchain and probably most AI company,...). I only work remotely from France. Yes I would prefer a FTE french contract, but I can do self employed contracts.
Before writing a full blog post, I want to gather some reactions.
What if we made it legally obligated that if an employee can show (putting aside the validation mechanism here, lot of options with different tradeoffs) they contribute to open source a bit (and i really mean a low amount. Even an obscure package count, even a few PR to fix real bug) on their non work time.
Then the employer have to give them one more (paid) free day a week. 80% job for the salary of 100% one.
@thisalex this has not been my experience with government. Policy makers tend to prefer super targeted bills, because then noone outside of the domain hear about it. It really simplifies the policy making work.
The larger it gets, the harder it gets to do anything.
For everyone that calls for ways to make open source more secure, or for all their magical solutions that will provide money and resources to FOSS maintainers, please read this.
This is a rare account of the reality of maintainers, things that are hard, but also how much knowledge and niche expertise you need for anything in there.
That is why just giving money to experts will not help that much. It is too hard to train experts in this. But we may make it easier
If you are on the board of an organization, you accepted a role of leadership. You may not think you did, and that is ok, misunderstanding happen. But when it comes time to do the role you signed up for, at least try to do it.
After the crisis, yes you can abdicate. But starting with abdication, you better accept that no one will ever respect you again.
For anyone wondering why I have not withdrawn my maintainer status from nixpkgs The Determinate Systems' Community, is it because I will follow the letter I signed. So we will check on 1st of May.
Bets are open, but I think we all know what PR I will have to make.
I need to write a blog post about this but in the meantime.
If you do postmortems, retrospective, incident analysis or whatever Learning from Incidents.
Consider that the Learning is about using the analysis as a tool for replanning. Do not focus only on "How did we get there?" but consider this a starting point to ask "How are we changing what our plan is?" and also "How are we reflecting on our model of the world?".
The goal is not to find what went wrong. The goal is to revisit decisions.
People often tell me I am awfully negative and pessimistic. Guilty as charged!
It is in large part because it feels really lonely and hopeless to yell into the void for years.
But the @sovtechfund gives me hope. Why? Because they did their legwork. They are a rare voice that seems to actually look at the problem before jumping to solutions, and it means their solution actually helps.
If you want to create an event to workshop solutions to help heavily ressource constrained maintainers, consider starting from the pov of "what kind of event a resource constrained maintainer could participate in".
Otherwise, your event will join the long list of useless one.
And if you need help thinking through that or bouncing ideas, my contact are all over my website. I will spend my constrained resources to help you, for free, because I do care a lot about this.