Default Open Source

Back in the day I worked for a company that defaulted to ”the public bit is on“ for GitHub repositories. It was largely a symbolic gesture of ”Open Source“ since we didn‘t (usually) attempt to create a community around the source, provide timely review of the occassional pull requests, or respond to issues. Years later, I still get tagged on an issue as a ”recent“ contributor. Despite our lack of commitment to community building, this still felt like the ”right“ thing to do.

Feelings matter. In retrospect, this 1-bit contributed more positive company culture than virtually any other effort. The management team that allowed this practice recognized that the value the company was providing wasn't code. The value was our passion for making customers happy.

That probably feels insincere, but I mean it. The product we provided was uptime. The product we provided was a dedication to making our customers successful. This came in the form of 3AM pages, an extremely talented support organization, and a product that most of us wanted to actually use.

The code was ”just“ a means to an end.