Creating an Open Source Office: Lessons from Twitter Given at OSCON 2015

1. Creating an Open Source Office
Lessons from Twitter
Welcome

2. CHRIS ANISZCZYK
Head of Open Source
#OSCON
@cra

3. #AGENDA
•The Rise of Open Source [Offices]
•Building an Open Source Office at Twitter
•Projects and Lessons Learned
•Concluding Thoughts
•Q&A

4. SOFTWARE IS EATING THE WORLD
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460

5. OPEN SOURCE IS EATING THE WORLD
http://www4.mercedes-benz.com/manual-cars/ba/foss/content/en/assets/FOSS_licences.pdfiOS: General->About->Legal->Legal Notices
“78% of companies are using open source software…”
“63% of companies are participating in open source…”
https://www.blackducksoftware.com/future-of-open-source
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you

6. COMPANIES FORMING OPEN SOURCE GROUPS
•Google: https://developers.google.com/open-source/
‣ “…tasked with maintaining a healthy relationship with the open source software
development community"
•Intel: https://01.org/
‣ “…international team dedicated to working within open communities.”
•Samsung: http://commit101.org/
‣ “The Open Source Group was formed in 2013 to do the following: Help guide the company
in effective consumption, collaboration, and development of open source software.
Provide advocacy on behalf of Samsung in external open source communities. Develop
consistent open source strategy and governance policies for the enterprise at large.”
•Microsoft: https://microsoft.com/opensource
‣ “Microsoft’s commitment to openness and collaboration is ingrained… These
collaborations have enabled new scenarios for customers and partners to take open
source software and integrate it with a Microsoft platform.”
‣ http://todogroup.org/blog/why-we-run-an-open-source-program-microsoft/

7. STARTUPS* EVEN FORMING OPEN SOURCE GROUPS!
•Box: http://opensource.box.com/
‣ http://todogroup.org/blog/creating-an-open-source-office-box/
‣ “we give back to the open source community whenever possible, by contributing
code to outside projects and sharing projects that we've developed internally”
•Dropbox: https://opensource.dropbox.com/
‣ “Dropbox loves open source! We participate in the open source community by
using open source software internally and open sourcing our own projects”
•Facebook: https://code.facebook.com/opensource
‣ “…we’re keen users and publishers of open software. We'll keep you up-to-date
with our new projects and releases…”
•GitHub:
‣ http://todogroup.org/blog/why-we-run-an-open-source-program-github
•Twitter:
‣ http://todogroup.org/blog/why-we-run-an-open-source-program-twitter/

8. #AGENDA
•The Rise of Open Source
•Building an Open Source Office at Twitter
•Projects and Lessons Learned
•Concluding Thoughts
•Q&A

9. BUILT ON OPEN SOURCE PRETTY MUCH SINCE DAY 1*
https://blog.twitter.com/2009/building-open-source

10. HackPrinceton - November 14-16, 2014@TwitterAds | Confidential
300M+
500M+
80%
Active users
Tweets / Day
of users are
mobile users
2006 2015
~4000
Employees

11. SCALING ENGINEERING WITH OPEN SOURCE?

13. SPEED AND MINIMUM VIABLE BUREAUCRACY
•Make the open source process pleasurable,
efficient and protect the company
•Build community in critical projects
•Training / culture are everything
•We serve our engineers

14. #AGENDA
•The Rise of Open Source
•Building an Open Source Office at Twitter
•Projects and Lessons Learned
•Concluding Thoughts
•Q&A

15. LESSONS FROM BOOTSTRAP
http://getbootstrap.com/

16. CHOOSE YOUR LICENSES DILIGENTLY
•Needed to migrate Apache License v2.0 to MIT License
•Get your license right from the start or go more permissive
https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/2054

17. BLACK SWANS CAN HAPPEN
•Hard to anticipate the success of a project…
•Always ensure engineers have time to manage projects…
https://github.com/search?l=&o=desc&q=stars%3A
%3E1&ref=advsearch&s=stars&type=Repositories

18. IF YOU LOVE IT SET IT FREE
•What happens if project leads leave your company?
•Ensure projects have owners or give it to the community :)
https://blog.twitter.com/2013/bootstrap-30

19. LESSONS FROM MESOS
https://mesos.apache.org

20. COLLABORATE WITH ACADEMIA
•Apache Mesos was born out of Berkeley’s AMPLab
http://goo.gl/lA6xco https://mesos.apache.org

21. FOUNDATIONS CAN HELP
•Open source foundations force good practices on you
•Foundations can foster collaboration and accelerate growth
https://blog.twitter.com/2012/incubating-apache-mesos

22. LESSONS FROM TWEMCACHE
https://github.com/twitter/twemcache

23. FORKING HAPPENS; DON’T SURPRISE UPSTREAM
•Try to avoid forking at all costs if you can, if you do fork
please notify and work with upstream on why
https://blog.twitter.com/2012/caching-with-twemcache

24. LESSONS FROM PARQUET
http://parquet.apache.org/

25. COLLABORATE FROM THE START
•Share your code with peers to gauge interest in
collaborating before you open source it to everyone
•Launching with collaborators can help momentum
•Project Timeline
‣ Fall 2012: Twitter and Cloudera merge efforts on Parquet
‣ March 2013: open source announcement; Criteo joins
‣ July 2013: 1.0 release; 18 contributions from 5 organizations
‣ May 2014: enter Apache incubator; 40+ contributors
‣ May 2015: Parquet graduates; 60+ contributors
https://blog.twitter.com/2015/graduating-apache-parquet

26. OTHER
LESSONS

27. #THANKYOU (ALWAYS GIVE THANKS)
•Thank your first time contributors
•Send swag or anything meaningfuly, it goes a long way!
•We used to send handwritten #ThankYou cards

28. DEVELOPER ADVOCATES ARE GOLD
•Community doesn’t come for free!
•You need devs that focus on the contributor experience
•You need devs that focus on code samples
•You need devs that focus on speaking at events
•You need devs that focus on organizing events!
http://www.slideshare.net/chanezon/introduction-to-google-developer-relations

29. EMPLOYEES AS OPEN SOURCE CELEBRITIES
•Having successful open source projects are a double edged
swords… as employees get more popular… they may get
more popular to competing employers and leave :(
•As a benefit, employees tend to bring the projects they
developed with them to new companies and bring diversity
to the project :)
•It’s on you to make your company amazing so people stay :)
https://github.com/twitter/scalding/wiki/Powered-By

30. CODE OF CONDUCTS ARE GOOD
•Set expectations and make your community welcoming
•Always better to be prepared (shit will happen)
https://engineering.twitter.com/opensource/code-of-conduct
http://todogroup.org/opencodeofconduct/
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Code_of_conduct_evaluations
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents

31. INVOLVE OPEN SOURCE IN M&A CHATS
•Don’t be scared to discuss open sourcing code as part of an
acquisitions, good things can come out it! (e.g., TextSecure)
https://whispersystems.org/http://storm.apache.org/

32. YOU WILL HAVE UGLY BABIES
•People will call your project useless and so on
•Take the criticism as a compliment that people care enough
•Also use it as an advantage, people may point you to better
technologies you weren’t aware of

33. DIVERSITY IS THE SPICE OF LIFE
•Diversity is good for the long term health of your projects:
participate in Outreachy, GSoC, Facebook Open Academy …
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-makes-us-smarter/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_effects_of_biodiversity
http://outreachy.org

34. #AGENDA
•The Rise of Open Source
•Building an Open Source Office at Twitter
•Projects and Lessons Learned
•Concluding Thoughts
•Q&A

35. CONTRIBUTION BRINGS INFLUENCE
•Know the critical open source projects you
organization depends
•Contributions are the currency of open
source
•Control your destiny via influence

36. COMMUNITY DOESN’T COME FOR FREE
•Don’t just throw something on Github and
expect magical contributors from the world
•Community is built one member at a time
(preferrably with dev advocates)

37. OPEN SOURCE OFFICE ALL THE THINGS
•Make the lives of your engineers easier by
convincing your companies to form open
source groups or offices
http://todogroup.org/

38. Thank You
Q&A?

39. flo
SHARING IS CARING, HELP US MAKE TWITTER BETTER!
https://github.com/twitter https://twitterdev.github.io

40. flo
#RESOURCES
https://twitter.com/TwitterOSS
https://twitter.com/TwitterDev
http://todogroup.org/blog/why-we-run-an-open-
source-program-twitter/
http://todogroup.org/blog/why-we-run-an-open-
source-program-microsoft/
http://todogroup.org/blog/why-we-run-an-open-
source-program-github/
http://todogroup.org/blog/why-we-run-an-open-
source-program-box/
http://todogroup.org/blog/why-we-run-an-open-
source-program-walmart-labs/