The Power of Community in Open Source Development

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Show Notes

"One of the projects that I work on right now that's probably one of my more successful ones, It's a scientific data visualization library for .NET. It's called ScottPlot. The name is silly. It's because when I made it, I thought I was the only person going to be using it. And then some other people started using it and that wasn't totally unexpected. But now it's about a million and a half installs on NuGet. I think it has like 5,000 stars on GitHub. It's really cool just to watch this thing grow."— Scott Harden

Welcome friends to The Modern .NET Show; the premier .NET podcast, focusing entirely on the knowledge, tools, and frameworks that all .NET developers should have in their toolbox. We are the go-to podcast for .NET developers worldwide, and I am not your host: Jamie. I'm Delilah and I will be recording the intro for this episode because Jamie is suffering with a throat infection.

In this episode, Scott Harden joined us for the first of three episodes on .NET, open source, and NuGet. This part of the conversation is all about what Scott calls "The Spirit of Open Source in a Modern .NET World." This is the background information on why Scott (and Jamie) believe that developers should look to creating open source works, putting them out there, and gathering feedback from people. Not only will it enhance your technical skill set (and very quickly), but it will also allow you to get experience at failing in a safe space: in public.

"Now, humans evolved to like helping people in our in-group. And I think it means a lot that we treat anonymous strangers on the Internet, or we can treat them. Obviously, this can go wrong. But we can treat them as part of our in-group. Like, "hey, we are all in this technical world together. We are struggling. Let's figure this out together." And that bridge of trust and effort and you're sharing your knowledge with another person, it is such a positive experience all around the table"— Scott Harden

This episode has a lot of resources in the accompanying show notes, so if you're listening along in a podcast player make sure to head to the website (there'll be a link). That way you don't miss out on all the wonderful things Scott and Jamie talked about.

And remember, this is just part one. In the next two parts, Scott and I talk about creating NuGet packages, ensuring their safety and security, and how to be a good citizen of the open source community. Talk about a festive gift for you all.

And definitely go ahead and check out Scott's work and writings. He's a really interesting person, an amazing open source contributor, and an all-round great person.

Anyway, without further ado, let's sit back, open up a terminal, type in `dotnet new podcast` and we'll dive into the core of Modern .NET.

Supporting the Show

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Full Show Notes

The full show notes, including links to some of the things we discussed and a full transcription of this episode, can be found at: https://dotnetcore.show/season-7/the-spirit-of-open-source-in-a-modern-net-world-with-scott-harden/

Scott's Links:

• scottplot.net
• swharden.com
• GitHub
• LinkedIn

Useful Links

• Job crafting
• Left-Pad incident
• The story behind colors.js and faker.js
• What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world
• Hello, Duende
• Double-precision floating-point format
• Dave Farley
• Sigstore
• Add support for sigstore as signing method for NuGet packages
• The Primeagen
• Coding Blocks

Some episodes of this show focusing on App Security and dependency management

• The Risks of Third Party Code With Niels Tanis
• Application Security with Tanya Janca
• Building Secure Software: Unveiling the Hidden Dependencies with Niels Tanis
• Managing Dependencies with M. Scott Ford
• Breaking Up with Tech Debt: A Love Story with M. Scott Ford

Books that Jamie gives to interns:

• The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo
• Start With Why by Simon Sinek
• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

ScottPlot.NET:

• GitHub
• NuGet
• scottplot.net
• The charts that Scott was referring to when talking about downloads per day, can be seen here

Code Licenses mentioned (in order):

• MIT
• CC0
• Apache 2
• L-GPL v3
• WTFPL

Programming languages Jamie mentioned (in order)

• Go
• Odin
• Zig

Supporting the show:

• Leave a rating or review
• Buy the show a coffee
• Become a patron

Getting in Touch:

• Via the contact page
• Joining the Discord

Remember to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, or wherever you find your podcasts, this will help the show's audience grow. Or you can just share the show with a friend.

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You can support the show by making a monthly donation on the show's Patreon page at: https://www.patreon.com/TheDotNetCorePodcast.