Nick Burgan
Nick is an engineer working in both software and hardware over his 20 year career. He most recently was a Principal Engineer at Puppet.
Sessions
Using open source projects to bootstrap will help you bring your product to market faster, right? We all know that idea, and countless startups have proven it true. But it’s what you do afterwards that really matters. Being a good open source citizen is more than just chucking your source code at a GitHub repository (or worse, only part of your source code!) and expecting to reap the benefits of an open source community forever.
A true open source company invites collaboration and actively participates. Its engineers and product managers engage with pull requests and issues and help steward feature growth that actually matters to the users. It communicates openly with its community about statuses and roadmaps, even when the news isn’t super rosy. And it contributes fixes upstream to the projects it uses.
This isn’t just idealism. Ignoring community leads to stagnation and a poor market fit. I’m sure we’ve all seen examples of that. This talk will explore how companies can genuinely contribute to the open source community, building real connections and creating lasting impact together with their users.
Description: Most of us remember how long it took for Puppet to get Debian 12 packages. The build pipeline was long and complex and used a lot of internal tooling that had to be updated manually.
In current news though, the new OpenVox build pipeline has been totally revamped and simplified and adding support for RHEL 10 took about 10 minutes. Most of that was spent waiting for the build to complete. Nick would like to explain how it works and what we still have left to do.