Polishing Cars Wasn't In My Job Description


­"Whose turn is it to prep the JavaCar demo?" I asked my colleague. As I suspected, the answer was, "Yours!"

However, I wasn't too disappointed, as I was happy to show off what my team at Sun Microsystems Labs had built. Our JavaCar was well ahead of its time—a vehicle testbed for in-car networking, telematics, and infotainment, all before those concepts existed in the mainstream.

So, I set about carefully starting the demo, as well as using a spray bottle to give the vehicle a quick wipedown before showing the car to another set of visiting executives. As I was doing this, I suddenly thought back over the past six months of development—we were a three-person team inside of the research organization, yet we'd garnered code contributions from over 15 different individuals throughout multiple teams in the company to make this demo a reality.

While I didn't think too much more about it that day, that project had propelled me into a career in open source.

Inner source & community

After finishing the JavaCar project, I set about trying to collect the "loose pocket change" projects from throughout Sun Microsystems—those projects that were utilized by lots of people, sometimes in many different forms or versions. I had my first real introduction to open source when I took the PHP code base from Sourceforge.net (when it still was open source) and built an internal Sourceforge instance inside of Sun.

I also had my first realization that just building a tool for a problem wasn't enough—I spent a large amount of time finding projects, convincing people, as well as connecting different teams inside and outside of Sun Labs together. I was an inner source community manager; I just didn't know it yet.

After I left Sun, I spent some time in a startup, where my open source and community skills weren't really needed (except to consume some open source software, occasionally). However, my next stop was Motorola, where I continued to pursue my job as an engineer, working on embedded software for a Linux/Java phone platform.

What happened next changed the course of my career and further pushed me into the world of open source and community management. By chance, I found someone at Motorola who had built an internal version of Sourceforge for the company—sound familiar? He and I started chatting, and before I knew it I was helping him manage the site, as well as writing extensions and other PHP code to improve the site's functionality and integrate it with other Motorola systems. We also contributed back small changes to the code base and other open source projects we relied on.

Our site became very popular internally, with a large portion of the company starting to use it. We hired a team of two to do the technical and day-to-day management, and I (reluctantly) became more of a community evangelist/strategist. However, this change pushed me in the direction that defines my career today—talking about, educating, evangelizing, and coaching others about the importance and benefits of open (and inner) source software and methods, all of which I truly enjoy!

The metamorphosis is complete

I often joke that I no longer do technology for a living, I just talk about it. While I still do occasionally hack on shell, Perl, or other scripting languages, I primarily work at helping make companies successful in their use of open source (including applying the same principles to internal collaboration).

I've spent time helping build strategic open source consulting offerings at Red Hat, contributed to launching an open source group at Samsung, and now I'm directing open source strategy efforts at Autodesk. What have I learned through this journey to open source and community?
  • Don't be afraid to go off in new directions and try things that might make you uncomfortable.
  • Relationships (even virtual ones) matter—they help you get things done.
  • "Release early, release often" works for more than just code.
My advice for anyone starting out in open source is simple: Be humble, but bold. The great thing about open source is that you can make a great impact, but you have to do it within the confines of a community, and learning how to bring your best while working in sometimes challenging interpersonal situations is a skill that you can only acquire through practice.

Originally posted on opensource.com. 
Reposted with permission and under Creative Commons.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Great Panel Discussion!

Thanks to Gwyn Firth Murray , Larry Augustin , and Jeff Luczcz for a very entertaining panel discussion around Open Source at the recent eBig meeting . I was a bit nervous about how this panel would come together since I was the 'rookie,' whereas Gwyn had worked with Larry and Jeff separately before. However, the commonality of the passion for Open Source brought this panel together nicely and there was an excellent exchange of ideas between and amongst the panel (as well as our audience). I think we had someone in the audience comment on the fact that it seemed like we had all known each other a long time! :) The areas we covered during the talk were: licensing, community development, and reasons for using Open Source. I think the panel all agreed on good reasons for using Open Source, with all of us giving cogent examples of what the value proposition for using Open Source is (taking advantage of the huge amount of R&D and work that goes into good Open Source project...
Read more

Community Management is a Career, Not a Job

'Community Management' is a hot topic, & a hot job field , but I think it's important to articulate that it's not a role which should be approached as a 'job'. What do I mean by that? Community Management should NOT be: A role you 'settle' for because you can't do other things Something you do as an ancillary part of your 'real job' Something you get into 'because it's hot right now' A position that you can perform in isolation, without constant upgrading of your skills/knowledge I've talked in the past about what kinds of skill sets I believe are necessary to be an effective community manager, and as I thought about my own career path, I realized that early on in my community management career, I considered myself an engineer doing community management, whereas I now think of myself as a community manager with an engineering background. It is a subtle, yet hugely important difference - one that allows me to draw on a...
Read more

The Power of the Open Source Periphery

Like a lot of people in the tech world, I try to read a variety of publications (both online and physical versions) to keep up with what is going on in the dizzying world of technology. Recently, I read a great article in a recent issue of Wired entitled Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up . This article explains in some detail, with examples, the problem of 'failure blindness' in scientific research. This phenomenon causes scientists and researchers to ignore anomalies in their results they didn't expect, which are therefore categorized as 'failures'. The article goes on to state that one of the best ways of overcoming this bias is to involve other people from outside of your immediate speciality in discussions about your results. For me, this triggered the thought process of why it's important to encourage participation in your communities (Open Source or internal) from folks on the periphery of your project - non-specialists who have somethin...
Read more