The New Stack Podcast

Wix is a cloud-based development site for making HTML 5 websites and mobile sites with drag and drop tools. It is suited for the beginning user or the advanced developer, said Hila Fish, senior DevOps engineer for Wix, in an interview for The New Stack Makers at HashiCorp’s HashiConf Global conference in Los Angeles earlier this month. Our questions for Fish focused on Terraform, the open source infrastructure-as-code software tool: How has Terraform evolved in uses since Fish started using it in 2018?How does Wix make the most of Terraform to scale its infrastructure?What are some best practices Wix has used with Terraform?What are some pitfalls to avoid with Terraform?What is the approach to scaling across teams and avoiding refactoring to keep the integrations elegant and working Fish started using Terraform in an ad-hoc manner back in 2018. Over time she has learned how to use it for scaling operations. “If you want to scale your infrastructure, you need to use Terraform in a way that will allow you to do that,” Fish said.  Terraform can be used ad-hoc to create a machine as a resource, but scale comes with enabling infrastructure that allows the engineers to develop templates that get reused across many servers. “You need to use it in a way that will allow you to scale up as much as you can,” Fish said. Fish said best practices come from how to structure the Terraform code base. Much of it comes down to the teams and how Terraform gets implemented. Engineers each have their way of working. Standard practices can help. In onboarding new teams, a structured code base can be beneficial. New teams onboard and use models already in the code base. And what are some of the pitfalls of using Terraform? We get to that in the recording and more about integrations, why Wix is still on version 0.13, and some new capabilities for developers to use Terraform. Users have historically needed to learn HashiCorp configuration language (HCL) to use the HashiCorp configuration language. At Wix, Fish said, the company is implementing Terraform on the backend with a UI that developers can use without needing to learn HCL. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

DUBLIN — The mission of Linux Foundation Energy —  a collaborative, international effort by power companies to help move the world away from fossil fuels — has never seemed more urgent. In addition to the increased frequency and ferocity of extreme weather events like hurricanes and heat waves, the war between Russia and Ukraine has oil-dependent countries looking ahead to a winter of likely energy shortages. “I think we need to go faster,” said Benoît Jeanson, an enterprise architect at RTE, the French electricity transmission system operator.  He aded, “What we are doing with the Linux Foundation Energy is really something that will help for the future, and we need to go faster and faster. For this On the Road episode of The New Stack’s Makers podcast, recorded at Open Source Summit Europe here, we were joined by two guests who work in the power industry and whose organizations are part of LF Energy. In addition to Jeanson, this episode featured Jonas van den Bogaard, a solution architect and open source ambassador at Alliander, an energy network company that provides energy transport and distribution to a large part of the Netherlands. Van den Bogaard also serves on the technical advisory council of LF Energy. Heather Joslyn, features editor of TNS, hosted this conversation.18 Open Source ProjectsLF Energy, started in 2018, now includes 59 member organizations, including cloud providers Google and Microsoft, enterprises like General Electric, and research institutions like Stanford University. It currently hosts 18 open source projects; the podcast guests encouraged listeners to check them out and contribute to them. Among them: OpenSTEF, automated machine learning pipelines to deliver accurate forecasts of the load on the energy grid 48 hours ahead of time. “It gives us the opportunity to take action in time to prevent the maximum grid capacity [from being] reached,” said van den Bogaard. “That’s going to prevent blackouts and that sort of thing. And also, another side: it makes us able to add renewable energies to the grid.” Jeanson said that the open source projects aim to cover “every level of the stack. We also have tools that we want to develop at the substation level, in the field.” Among them: OperatorFabric, Written in Java and based on the Spring framework, OperatorFabric is a modular, extensible  platform for systems operators, including several features aimed at helping utility operators. It helps operators coordinate the many tasks and alerts they need to keep track of by aggregate notifications from several applications into a single screen. “Energy is of importance for everyone,” said van den Bogaard. “And especially moving to more cleaner and renewable energy is key for us all. We have great minds all around the world. And I really believe that we can achieve that. The best way to do that is to combine the efforts of all those great minds. Open source can be a great enabler of that.”Cultural Education NeededBut persuading decision-makers in the power industry to participate in building the next generation of open source solutions can be a challenge, van den Bogaard acknowledged. “You see, that the energy domain has been there for a long time, and has been quite stable, up to like 10 years ago.” he said. In such a tradition-bound culture, change is hard. In the cloud era, he added, a lot of organizations “need to digitalize and focus more on it and those capabilities are new. And also, open source, for in that matter is also a very new concept.” One obstacle in the energy industry taking more advantage of open source tools, Jeanson noted, is security: “Some organizations still see open source to be a potential risk.” Getting them on board, he said, requires education and training. He added, “vendors need to understand that open source is an opportunity that they should not be afraid of. That we want to do business with them based on open source. We just need to accelerate the momentum. Check out the whole episode to learn more about LF Energy’s work. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It's that time of the year again, when cloud native enthusiasts and professionals assemble to discuss all things Kubernetes. KubeCon+CloudNativeCon 2023 is being held later this month in Detroit, October 24-28. In this latest edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, we spoke with Priyanka Sharma, general manager of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation — which organizes KubeCon —and CERN computer engineer and KubeCon co-chair Ricardo Rocha. For this show, we discussed what we can expect from the upcoming event. This year, there will be a focus on Kubernetes in the enterprise, Sharma said. "We are reaching a point where Kubernetes is becoming the de facto standard when it comes to container orchestration. And there's a reason for it. It's not just about Kubernetes. Kubernetes spawned the cloud native ecosystem and the heart of the cloud native movement is building fast, resiliently observable software that meets customer needs. So ultimately, it's making you a better provider to your customers, no matter what kind of business you are." Of this year's topics, security will be a big theme, Rocha said. Technologies such as Falco and Cilium will be discussed. Linux kernel add-on eBPF is popping up in a lot of topics, especially around networking. Observability and hybrid deployments also weigh heavily on the agenda. "The number of solutions [around Hybrid] are quite large, so it's interesting to see what people come up with," he said. In addition to KubeCon itself, this year there are a number of co-located events, held during or before the conference itself. Some of them hosted by CNCF while others are hosted by other companies such as Canonical. They include the Network Application Day, BackstageCon, CloudNative eBPF Day, CloudNativeSecurityCon, CloudNative WASM Day, Data-on-Kubernetes Day, EnvoyCon, gRPCConf, KNativeCon, Spinnaker Summit, Open Observability Day, Cloud Native Telco Day, Operator Day, The Continuous Delivery Summit, among others. What's amazing is not only the number of co-located events, but the high quality of talks being held there. "Co-located events are a great way to know what's exciting to folks in the ecosystem right now," Sharma said. "Cloud native has really become the scaffolding of future progress. People want to build on cloud native, but have their own focus areas." WebAssembly (WASM) is a great example of this. "In the beginning, you wouldn't have thought of WebAssembly as part of the cloud native narrative, but here we are," Sharma said. "The same thinking from professionals who conceptualized cloud native in the beginning are now taking it a step further." "There's a lot of value in co-located events, because you get a group of people for a longer period in the same room, focusing on one topic," Rocha said. Other topics discussed in the podcast include the choice of Detroit as a conference hub, the fun activities that CNCF have planned in between the technical sessions, surprises at the keynotes, and so much more! Give it a listen. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Armon Dadgar and Mitchell Hashimoto are long-time open source practitioners. It's that practitioner focus they established as core to their approach when they started HashiCorp about ten years ago. Today, HashiCorp is a publicly traded company. Before they started HashiCorp, Dadgar and Hashimoto were students at the University of Washington. Through college and afterward, they cut their teeth on open source and learning how to build software in open source. HashiCorp's business is an outgrowth of the two as practitioners in open source communities, said Dadgar, co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp, in an interview at the HashiConf conference in Los Angeles earlier this month. Both of them wanted to recreate the asynchronous collaboration that they loved so much about the open source projects they worked on as practitioners, Dadgar said. They knew that they did not want bureaucracy or a hard-to-follow roadmap. Dadgar cited Terraform as an example of their approach. Terraform is Hashicorp's open-source, infrastructure-as-code, software tool and reflects the company's model to control its core while providing a good user experience. That experience goes beyond community development and into the application architecture itself. "If you're a weekend warrior, and you want to contribute something, you're not gonna go read this massively complicated codebase to understand how it works, just to do an integration," Dadgar said." So instead, we built a very specific integration surface area for Terraform." The integration is about 200 lines of code, Dadgar said. They call the integration their core plus plugin model, with a prescriptive scaffold, examples of how to integrate, and the SDK. Their "golden path" to integration is how the company has developed a program that today has about 2,500 providers. The HashiCorp open source model relies on its core and plugin model. On Twitter, one person asked why doesn't HashiCorp be a proprietary company. Dadgar referred to HashiCorp's open source approach when asked that question in our interview. "Oh, that's an interesting question," Dadgar said. "You know, I think it'd be a much harder, company to scale. And what I mean by that is, if you take a look at like a Terraform community or Vault – there's thousands of contributors. And that's what solves the integration problem. Right? And so if you said, we were proprietary, hey, how many engineers would it take to build 2000 TerraForm integrations? It'd be a whole lot more people that we have today. And so I think fundamentally, what open source helps you solve is the fact that, you know, modern infrastructure has this really wide surface area of integration. And I don't think you can solve that as a proprietary business." "I don't think we'd be able to have nearly the breadth of integration. We could maybe cover the core cloud providers. But you'd have 50 Terraform providers, not 2500 Terraform providers."   Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

DUBLIN — Europe's open source contributors, according to The Linux Foundation's first-ever survey of them released in September, are driven more by idealism than their American counterparts. The data showed that social reasons for contributing to open source projects were more often cited by Europeans than by Americans, who were more likely to say they participate in open source for professional advancement. A big part of Gabriele (Gab) Columbro's mission as the general manager of the new Linux Foundation Europe, will be to marry Europe's "romantic" view of open source to greater commercial opportunities, Columbro told The New Stack's Makers podcast. The On the Road episode of Makers, recorded in Dublin at Open Source Summit Europe, was hosted by Heather Joslyn, TNS's features editor. Columbro, a native of Italy who also heads FINOS, the fintech open source foundation. recalled his own roots as an individual contributor to the Apache project, and cited what he called "a very grassroots, passion, romantic aspect of open source" in Europe By contrast, he noted, "there is definitely a much stronger commercial ecosystem in the United States. But the reality is that those two, you know, natures of open source are not alternatives." Columbro said he sees advantages in both the idealistic and the practical aspects of open source, along with the notion in the European Union and other countries in the region that the Internet and the software that supports it have value as shared resources. "I'm really all about marrying sort of these three natures of open source: the individual-slash-romantic nature, the commercial dynamics, and the public sector sort of collective value," he said.A 'Springboard' for Regional ProjectsEurope sits thousands of miles away from the headquarters of the FAANG tech behemoths — Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google. (Columbro, in fact, is still based in Silicon Valley, though he says he plans to return to Europe at some point.) For individual developers, he said, Linux Foundation Europe will help give regional projects increased visibility and greater access to potential contributors. Contributing a project to Linux Foundation Europe, he said, is "a powerful way to potentially supercharge your project." He added, "I think any developer should consider this as a potential springboard platform for the technology, not just to be visible in Europe, but then hopefully, beyond." The European organization's first major project, the OpenWallet Foundation, will aim to help create a template for developers to build digital wallets. "I find it very aligned with not only the vision of the Linux Foundation that is about not only creating successful open source projects but defining new markets and new commercial ecosystems around these open source projects." It's also, Columbro added, "very much aligned with the sort of vision of Europe of creating a digital commons, based on open source whereby they can achieve a sort of digital independence."Europe's Turmoil Could Spark InnovationAs geopolitical and economic turmoil roils several nations in Europe, Columbro suggested that open source could see a boom if the region's companies start cutting costs. He places his hopes on open source collaboration to help reconcile some differences. "Certainly I do believe that open source has the potential to bring parties together, " Columbro said. Also, he noted, "generally we see open source and investment in open source to be counter-cyclical with the trends of investments in proprietary software. ...  in other words, when there is more pressure, and when there is more pressure to reduce costs, or to, you know, reduce the workforce. "That’s when people are forced to look more seriously about ways to actually collaborate while still maintaining throughput and efficiency. And I think open source is the prime way to do so. Listen to this On the Road episode of Makers to learn more about Linux Foundation Europe. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Brian Douglas was “the Beyoncé of GitHub.” He jokingly crowned himself with that title during his years at that company, where he advocated for open source and a more inclusive community supporting it. His work there eventually led to his new startup, Open Sauced. Like the Queen Bey, Douglas’ mission is to empower a community. In his case, he’s seeking to support the open source community. With his former employer, GitHub, serving 4 million developers worldwide, the potential size of that audience is huge. In this episode of The Tech Founder Odyssey podcast, he shared why empowerment and breaking down barriers to make anyone “awesome” in open source was the motivation behind his startup journey. Beyoncé “has a superfan group, the Beyhive, that will go to bat for her,” Douglas pointed out. “So if Beyoncé makes a country song, the Beyhive is there supporting her country song. If she starts doing the house music, which is her latest album, [they] are there to the point where like, you cannot say bad stuff about, he pointed out,. So what I’m focused on is having a strong community and having strong ties.” Open Sauced, which launched in June, seeks to build open source intelligence platform to help companies to stay competitive. Its aim is to help give more potential open source contributors the information they need to get started with projects, and help maintain them over time The conversation was co-hosted by Colleen Coll and Heather Joslyn of The New Stack.Web 2.0 ‘Opened the World’Douglas’ introduction to tech started as a kid “cutting his teeth” on a Packard Bell and a shared computer at the community center inside his apartment complex, where he grew up outside of Tampa, Florida. “I don't know what computer was in there, but it ran DOS,” he said. “And I got to play, like, Wolfenstein and eventually Duke Nukem and stuff like that. So that was my first sort of like, touch of a computer and I actually knew what I was doing.” With his MBA in finance, the last recession in 2008 left only sales jobs available. But Douglas always knew he wanted to “build stuff.” “I've always been like a copy and paste [person] and loved playing DOS games,” he told The New Stack. “I eventually [created] a pretty nice MySpace profile. then someone told me ‘Hey, you know, you could actually build apps now.’ “And post Web 2.0. people have frameworks and rails and Django. You just have to run a couple scripts, and you've got a web page live and put that in Heroku, or another server, and you're good. And that opened the world.” Open Sauced began as a side project when he was director of developer advocacy at GitHub; He started working on the project full time in June, after about two years of tinkering with it. Douglas didn’t grow up with money, he said, so moving from as an employee to the risky life of a CEO seeking funding prompted him to create his own comprehensive strategy. This included content creation (including a podcast, The Secret Sauce), other marketing, and shipping frontend code. GitHub was very supportive of him spinning off Open Sauced as an independent startup, with colleagues assisting in refining his pitches to venture capital investors to raise funds. “At GitHub, they have inside of their employee employment contract a moonlight clause,” Douglas said. Which means, he noted, because the company is powered by open source, “basically, whatever you work on, as long as you're not competing directly against GitHub, rebuilding it from the ground up, feel free to do whatever you need to do moonlight.”Support for Blacks in TechOpen Sauced will also continue Douglas’ efforts to increase representation of Blacks in tech and open pathways to level up their skills, similar to his work at GitHub with the Employee Resource Group (ERG) the Blacktocats. “The focus there was to make sure that people had a home, like a community of belonging,” he said. “If you're a black employee at GitHub, you have a space and it was very helpful with things like 2020, during George Floyd. lt was the community [in which] we all supported each other during that situation.” Douglas’ mission to rid the effects of imposter syndrome and champion anyone interested in open source makes him sound more like an open source ”whisperer”’ than a Beyoncé. Whatever the title, his iconic pizza brand — the company’s web address is “opensauced.pizza” — was his version, he said, of creating album cover art before forming the band. His podcast’s tagline urges listeners to “stay saucy.” His plan for doing that at Open Sauced is to encourage new open source contributors. “It's nice to know that projects can now opt in … but as a first-time contributor, where do I start? We can show you, ‘Hey, this project had five contributions, they're doing a great job. Why don't you start here?’ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Amazon Web Services would not be what it is today without open source. "I think it starts with sustainability," said David Nalley, head of open source and marketing at AWS in an interview at the Open Source Summit in Dublin for The New Stack Makers. "And this really goes back to the origin of Amazon Web Services. AWS would not be what it is today without open source." Long-term support for open source is one of three pillars of the organization's open source strategy. AWS builds and innovates on top of open source and will maintain that approach for its innovation, customers, and the larger digital economy. "And that means that there's a long history of us benefiting from open source and investing in open source," Nalley said. "But ultimately, we're here for the long haul. We're going to continue making investments. We're going to increase our investments in open source." Customers' interest in open source is the second pillar of the AWS open source strategy. "We feel like we have to make investments on behalf of our customers," Nalley said. "But the reality is our customers are choosing open source to run their workloads on." [sponsor_note slug="amazon-web-services-aws" ][/sponsor_note] The third pillar focuses on advocating for open source in the larger digital economy. Notable is how much AWS's presence in the market played a part in Paul Vixie's decision to join the company. Vixie, an Internet pioneer, is now vice president of security and an AWS distinguished engineer who was also interviewed for the New Stack Makers podcast at the Open Source Summit. Nalley has his recognizable importance in the community. Nalley is the president of the Apache Software Foundation, one of the world's most essential open source foundations. The importance of its three-pillar strategy shows in many of the projects that AWS supports. AWS recently donated $10 million to the Open Source Software Supply Chain Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation. AWS is a significant supporter of the Rust Foundation, which supports the Rust programming language and ecosystem. It puts a particular focus on maintainers that govern the project. Last month, Facebook unveiled the PyTorch Foundation that the Linux Foundation will manage. AWS is on the governing board. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Paul Vixie grew up in San Francisco. He dropped out of high school in 1980. He worked on the first Internet gateways at DEC and, from there, started the Internet Software Consortium (ISC), establishing Internet protocols, particularly the Domain Name System (DNS). Today, Vixie is one of the few dozen in the technology world with the title "distinguished engineer," working at Amazon Web Services as vice president of security, where he believes he can make the Internet a more safe place. As safe as before the Internet emerged. "I am worried about how much less safe we all are in the Internet era than we were before," Vixie said in an interview at the Open Source Summit in Dublin earlier this month for The New Stack Makers podcast. "And everything is connected, and very little is understood. And so, my mission for the last 20 years has been to restore human safety to pre-internet levels. And doing that at scale is quite the challenge. It'll take me a lifetime." So why join AWS? He spent decades establishing the ISC. He started a company called Farsight, which came out of ISC. He sold Farsight in November of last year when conversations began with AWS. Vixie thought about his mission to better restore human safety to pre-internet levels when AWS asked a question that changed the conversation and led him to his new role. "They asked me, what is now in retrospect, an obvious question, 'AWS hosts, probably the largest share of the digital economy that you're trying to protect," Vixie said. "Don't you think you can complete your mission by working to help secure AWS?' "The answer is yes. In fact, I feel like I'm going to get more traction now that I can focus on strategy and technology and not also operate a company on the side. And so it was a very good win for me, and I hope for them." Interviewing Vixie is such an honor. It's people like Paul who made so much possible for anyone who uses the Internet. Just think of that for a minute -- anyone who uses the Internet have people like Paul to thank. Thanks Paul -- you are a hero to many. Here's to your next run at AWS.     Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ryan Dahl is the co-founder and creator of Deno, a runtime for JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly based on the V8 JavaScript engine and the Rust programming language. He is also the creator of Node.js. We interviewed Dahl for The New Stack Technical Founder Odyssey series. "Yeah, so we have a JavaScript runtime," Dahl said. "It's pretty similar in, in essence, to Node. It executes some JavaScript, but it's much more modern. " The Deno project started four years ago, Dahl said. He recounted how writing code helped him rethink how he developed Node. Dahl wrote a demo of a modern, server-side JavaSript runtime. He didn't think it would go anywhere, but sure enough, it did. People got pretty interested in it. Deno has "many, many" components, which serve as its foundation. It's written in Rust and C++ with a different type of event loop library. Deno has non-blocking IO as does Node. Dahl has built his work on the use of asynchronous technologies. The belief system carries over into how he manages the company. Dahl is an asynchronous guy and runs his company in such a fashion. As an engineer, Dahl learned that he does not like to be interrupted by meetings. The work should be as asynchronous as possible to avoid interruptions. Deno, the company, started during the pandemic, Dahl said. Everyone is remote. They pair program a lot and focus on short, productive conversations. That's an excellent way to socialize and look deeper into problems. How is for Dahl to go from programming to CEO? "I'd say it's relatively challenging," Dahl said. I like programming a lot. Ideally, I would spend most of my time in an editor solving programming problems. That's not really what the job of being a CEO is." Dahl said there's a lot more communication as the CEO operates on a larger scale. Engineering teams need management to ensure they work together effectively, deliver features and solve problems for developers. Overall, Dahl takes it one day at a time. He has no fundamental theory of management. He's just trying to solve problems as they come. "I mean, my claim to fame is like bringing asynchronous sockets to the mainstream with nonblocking IO and stuff. So, you know, asynchronous is deeply embedded and what I'm thinking about. When it comes to company organization, asynchronous means that we have rotating meeting schedules to adapt to people in different time zones. We do a lot of meeting recordings. So if you can't make it for whatever reason, you're not in the right time zone, you're, you know, you're, picking up your kids, whatever. You can go back and watch the recording. So we basically record every every meeting, we try to keep the meeting short. I think that's important because nobody wants to watch hours and hours of videos. And we use, we use chats a lot. And chat and email are forms of asynchronous communication where you don't need to kind of meet with people one on one. And yeah, I guess I guess the other aspect of that is just keeping meetings to a minimum. Like there's there's a few situations where you really need to get everybody in the room. I mean, there are certainly times when you need to do that. But I tried to avoid that as much as possible, because I think that really disrupts the flow of a lot of people working." Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The whole world uses open source, but as we’ve learned from the Log4j debacle, “free” software isn’t really free. Organizations and their customers pay for it when projects aren’t frequently updated and maintained. How can we support open source project maintainers — and how can we decide which projects are worth the time and effort to maintain? “A lot of people pick up open source projects, and use them in their products and in their companies without really thinking about whether or not that project is likely to be successful over the long term,” Dawn Foster, director of open source community strategy at VMware’s open source program office (OSPO), told The New Stack’s audience during this On the Road edition of The New Stack’s Makers podcast. In this conversation recorded at Open Source Summit Europe in Dublin, Ireland, Foster elaborated on the human cost of keeping open source software maintained, improved and secure —  and how such projects can be sustained over the long term. The conversation, sponsored by Amazon Web Services, was hosted by Heather Joslyn, features editor at The New Stack. Assessing Project Health: the ‘Lottery Factor’ One of the first ways to evaluate the health of an open source project, Foster said, is the “lottery factor”: “It's basically if one of your key maintainers for a project won the lottery, retired on a beach tomorrow, could the project continue to be successful?” “And if you have enough maintainers and you have the work spread out over enough people, then yes. But if you're a single maintainer project and that maintainer retires, there might not be anybody left to pick it up.” Foster is on the governing board for an project called Community Health Analytics Open Source Software — CHAOSS, to its friends — that aims to provide some reliable metrics to judge the health of an open source initiative. The metrics CHAOSS is developing, she said, “help you understand where your project is healthy and where it isn't, so that you can decide what changes you need to make within your project to make it better.” CHAOSS uses tooling like Augur and GrimoireLab to help get notifications and analytics on project health. And it’s friendly to newcomers, Foster said. “We spend...a lot of time just defining metrics, which means working in a Google Doc and thinking about all of the different ways you might possibly measure something — something like, are you getting a diverse set of contributors into your project from different organizations, for example.” Paying Maintainers, Onboarding Newbies It’s important to pay open source maintainers in order to help sustain projects, she said. “The people that are being paid to do it are going to have a lot more time to devote to these open source projects. So they're going to tend to be a little bit more reliable just because they're they're going to have a certain amount of time that's devoted to contributing to these projects.” Not only does paying people help keep vital projects going, but it also helps increase the diversity of contributors, “because you by paying people salaries to do this work in open source, you get people who wouldn't naturally have time to do that. “So in a lot of cases, this is women who have extra childcare responsibilities. This is people from underrepresented backgrounds who have other commitments outside of work,” Foster said. “But by allowing them to do that within their work time, you not only get healthier, longer sustaining open source projects, you get more diverse contributions.” The community can also help bring in new contributors by providing solid documentation and easy onboarding for newcomers, she said. “If people don't know how to build your software, or how to get a development environment up and running, they're not going to be able to contribute to the project.” And showing people how to contribute properly can help alleviate the issue of burnout for project maintainers, Foster said:  “Any random person can file issues and bug maintainers all day, in ways that are not productive. And, you know, we end up with maintainer burnout...because we just don't have enough maintainers," said Foster. “Getting new people into these projects and participating in ways that are eventually reducing the load on these horribly overworked maintainers is a good thing.” Listen or watch this episode to learn more about maintaining open source sustainability. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.