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dblock

1,312 karma · joined December 28, 2010

former CTO @ https://www.artsy.net dblock[at]dblock[dot]org

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/dblock; my proof: https://keybase.io/dblock/sigs/7wXppbb7yc3kCl_NlXemHZGnvpj0YfabOYPG8ZYWbOg ]

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dblock··on Elasticsearch is open source, again
Note on the ossinsights data point, there are 115 public repos in https://github.com/opensearch-project, including, as an example https://github.com/opensearch-project/k-nn where all vector search is written, or https://github.com/opensearch-project/neural-search.
dblock··on Elasticsearch is open source, again
OpenSearch only requires DCO.

https://github.com/opensearch-project/.github/blob/main/CONT...

dblock··on Elasticsearch is open source, again
You're right about documentation and tooling. There's some good momentum in the OpenSearch community around it though, and I am really excited by things like https://github.com/opensearch-project/documentation-website/....
dblock··on Elasticsearch is open source, again
"Elasticsearch" seems to be often referred to as a technology, as in ELK stack, rather than as in "Elastic" the company.
dblock··on Show HN: Strada (Strava and Discord)
Connects Strava in Discord and reposts athlete and club activities into Discord channels, including time, distance, pace, map and weather. Open-source at https://github.com/dblock/discord-strava.
dblock··on Artsy Engineering Handbook
Artsy absolutely borrowed its cultural elements from the USSR, товарищ Стаханов! :)
dblock··on Artsy Engineering Handbook
I am sorry you had this experience. No approach, closed or open, will ever substitute better leaders that aren’t taking advantage of you. Your experience is likely and sadly very common.
dblock··on Artsy Engineering Handbook
Yikes. I was being sarcastic to make my point. And if highlight the “jokes aside” in the second paragraph, you’ll tell me I wasn’t funny?
dblock··on Artsy Engineering Handbook
I worked at artsy in my 30s, and participated in many hackathons.
dblock··on Artsy Engineering Handbook
My daughter (second child) was born 4 days after I started at Artsy. Some of the best new ideas came from hackathons.
dblock··on Artsy Engineering Handbook
Joey who opened https://github.com/artsy/README/issues/427 is one of the best 10x engineers I’ve ever had the privilege to work with. If it’s important to him to rename all branches from “master” to “joey” I’d add my plus 1.

Jokes aside, please read Ash’s (another artsy alumni) post on psychological safety, hope it changes your mind: https://ashfurrow.com/blog/building-compassionate-software/

dblock··on Artsy Engineering Handbook
Thanks orta for the links!

On not having to ask permission.

We failed early. Had a wonderful demo day. Tons of sign ups. It started getting a bit long. Someone decided to shorten each session (max 2 minutes) and choose which ones were worth demoing. So you basically asked for permission to demo. Sign ups stopped. Nobody wanted to demo anymore. Demo day died and took a year to restart properly.

In general, establish “how”. Everything is in writing and GitHub workflow. When someone says “can I?” the answer is “why are you asking and haven’t done it (submit PR) yet”? This moves permission to a public discussion.

Think in terms of must have, should have, nice to have, not allow/disallow.

Managers already have the power to veto, so they don’t need to approve, allow or disallow. Managers need to say that to everyone all the time - “you have an idea, why haven’t you done it yet?”.

Everyone needs to do things very visibly and over communicate to enable gentle redirects and avoiding getting to veto.

Losing control is hard. Communications team wanted to review and control the engineering blog. I said hard no multiple times with every new comms leader. Asked them to comment on PRs.

Don’t fix problems that don’t exist. If someone wants a knob that looks like permission, ask them what problem they are trying to solve.

dblock··on Artsy Engineering Handbook
(I was CTO of Artsy then.)

tl;dr The README became possible because Artsy is open-source by default, and someone just decided one day to create a repo and some content, and didn't need permission to do so. It's also the repo that most new hires read before they even apply to the job, and they don't need permission to make changes either. GitHub workflow is how everything gets done.

More practically, check out https://github.com/artsy/meta/pull/1, which is one of the repos that merged into the handbook via https://github.com/artsy/README/pull/1. Also note that Artsy was founded in 2010. This handbook in its current iteration is 7-8 years in, but its content goes back to ~2011 in some kind of evolution. You'll want to check out https://artsy.github.io/blog/archives/ as well.

dblock··on Why the term "open source" is important
As someone who works on an open-source fork of the open-source software mentioned in the post, I am now exclusively referring to the open-source version of it as Apache (APLv2) -licensed. Maybe that's how we fix this confusion?
dblock··on The gift of it's your problem now
I work at AWS on opensearch.org, literally to do this as described.
dblock··on FAQs: Why we don’t have them (2013)
Or your entre website can be the FAQ.

https://www.drawingwithrussians.com/faq.html

dblock··on On Apple’s “Expanded Protections for Children” – A Personal Story
Time to (re)watch Brazil!
dblock··on Teaching open-source software in North Korea
I think so. But if anything I learned to be wary of propaganda on both sides.
dblock··on Teaching open-source software in North Korea
This is extremely shortsighted. Educated people are a lot harder to exploit. One of these students might one day lead the kind of change we’ve seen in numerous examples through history.
dblock··on Teaching open-source software in North Korea
I grew up in the USSR. There were multiple layers of the system. I was somewhere in the middle with my father being a well known poetry translator and grandfather writing propaganda. We listened to the BBC and Voice of America without reprimand, because of our status. Neighbors would face serious consequences for this. At 12 I was sent to the US to understand how capitalism is harmful. I think North Korea is making the same bet of creating a system in which some know all the truth and still work for the regime.
dblock··on The Swiss reject key climate change measures
(I’m Swiss)

This was a question of money. The Swiss were asked to be taxed (even more than they already are). They voted against the costs.

dblock··on Open Source Insights
Cool. Ironically, not open-source. +1 on wanting Ruby.
dblock··on OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana
Possibly my bad, it may require being a member of one of the orgs.
dblock··on OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana
A better URL to look at is https://github.com/enterprises/amazon.
dblock··on Here’s why we are going open source
This is important, +1.

If you want an example of what successful OSS looks like for over 10 years now, https://github.com/artsy, MIT license.

dblock··on Calc.exe is now open source; there’s surprising depth in its ancient code (2019)
PSA: Here's another, much more feature-rich calculator called Expression Calculator (or Global Calculator sold in Germany in 1997), written in Delphi - https://github.com/dblock/excalc, full source code and a working executable that still runs on any version of Windows.
dblock··on Making Win32 APIs More Accessible to More Languages
I was the de facto maintainer of JNA (https://github.com/java-native-access/jna) win32 bindings for years. The API metadata is welcome - we have always based all work on header files in the visual studio / windows SDK. Now there’s a change to generate that code - someone might want to try to replace hand crafted mappings in JNA with generated ones - there’s a huge test suite to work with.
dblock··on Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots
Anyone doing this in New York? I walk past the empty Hudson Yards every day.
dblock··on Is Oracle pushing TruffleRuby and IBM adding ppc64le into CI to fake adoption?
When it comes from non-contributors to the project, it just creates more burden on maintainers to keep fixing broken builds for no obvious benefit.
dblock··on Liquidity Is Coming
This could be really great for existing investors to buy employee equity. There's no easy way for an employee to reach the broad set of existing investors with a relatively small amount of options/shares. Founders are very much against this happening being worried that it sends the wrong signal. And at a later stage nobody will want to help a small employee do this as the amounts are not significant enough.
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