Guest Brian Douglas, former Head of DevRel at GitHub, discusses his time at GitHub, GitHub Actions, Copilot, and his new venture Open Sauced. Topics include open source projects, AI in development, historical data in GitHub, building open source projects, future of open source, and AI tools for developers.
Open Sauced provides org-level insights for open source projects to track metrics like new contributors and issue activity.
Open Sauced plans to enhance its platform with AI-powered insights and a vector database for trend analysis and discovering emerging developers.
Look beyond surface-level metrics like stars to assess the adoption of open source projects, analyzing factors that lead to contributions like PR approvals and forks.
Deep dives
Open Sauce: Providing Insights for Open Source Organizations
Open Sauce is a platform that offers org-level insights for open source projects. It aims to provide context and benchmarking for organizations to track metrics like new contributors, issue activity, and adoption. By analyzing data on contributions, releases, and bus factor, Open Sauce helps organizations identify health and areas of improvement. Additionally, it plans to enable developers to discover up-and-coming contributors and projects through its star search feature. The long-term goal is to increase the number of contributors to open source projects and create a more inclusive and diverse open source community.
Future Plans: AI-powered Insights and Vector Database
In the future, Open Sauce plans to enhance its platform with AI-powered insights and a vector database. These features will enable users to uncover the social graph of contributions, identify trends, and discover emerging developers. The goal is to leverage artificial intelligence to provide powerful analysis and increase the visibility of up-and-coming contributors and projects. Open Sauce also aims to capture event data and offer a time series database for historical analysis.
The Future of Open Source: Increasing Contributors and Inclusivity
Looking ahead, Open Sauce envisions a future where open source participation expands, increasing the number of contributors from the current 900,000 to nine million. By raising the minimum number of contributors per project to five, Open Sauce aims to create a more vibrant and exciting open source community. Additionally, the platform encourages companies to adopt open source and support employee involvement during work hours, fostering inclusivity and collaboration.
Focusing on Metrics for Open Source Adoption and Success
The podcast episode discussed the importance of looking beyond surface-level metrics like stars in order to assess the adoption and success of open source projects. The speaker highlighted the need to analyze factors such as PR approvals and forks that actually lead to releases and contributions. They mentioned the case of a project called Button, which gained a significant number of stars but had a low rate of forks that actually resulted in contributions. The speaker emphasized the importance of understanding the full story of a project's adoption and contributions, including factors like documentation, awareness, and barriers to entry.
Building Tools for Open Source Contribution and Funding
The podcast episode also discussed the value of developer advocacy and the role of DevRel in sharing and promoting open source projects. However, the speaker expressed the opinion that instead of solely relying on dedicated DevRel professionals, engineers should be encouraged to talk about and advocate for the projects they work on. The speaker emphasized the need for tools that can help developers showcase their work, such as generating reports of their contributions and building resumes or reference stocks of their open source involvement. The episode also touched on the importance of open source funding and the challenges faced by maintainers who receive sponsorship without clear guidance on how to use and distribute the funds.
This week we're joined by Brian Douglas, founder of Open Sauced and former Head of DevRel at GitHub. We talk about his time at GitHub, where he worked on GitHub Actions, GitHub Discussions, and GitHub Copilot. We also talk about his new company, Open Sauced, which is a tool for developers and businesses to get insights into their open source projects. Will Open Sauced save social coding? Find out on this week's episode of DevTools FM!
