Hey friends,
A couple weeks ago, we shared some great quotes from Linus Torvalds. Perhaps subconsciously influenced by that, this week I read “The Cathedral and The Bazaar” and started poking around an open source project that’s trying to rebuild Roam Research - called Athens (hehe get it Roam vs Athens).
The excitement around the Athens project is strong.
In The Cathedral and The Bazaar - Eric Raymond talks about an open source project’s necessary conditions:
what you need to be able to present is a plausible promise. Your program doesn't have to work particularly well. It can be crude, buggy, incomplete, and poorly documented. What it must not fail to do is (a) run, and (b) convince potential co-developers that it can be evolved into something really neat in the foreseeable future
I love that idea of a plausible promise. It’s almost a Tom Sawyer-esque “painting fences” sleight of hand - yes, what we have today isn’t magnificent, but we’ll get there one day, and we’ll have a ton of fun doing it. But only if you help out.
At the end of the day, the fence gets painted, and Linux gets built.
Where else could you apply the idea of a plausible promise? To me, the answers are limitless - and that’s a pretty exciting thing.
Change Log
This week, we’ve been making progress, but there’s something fun to share - both Feather and Summer of Shipping now live at real URLs!
An extremely early version of Feather (which we might rename due to a naming collision - or we might not): https://feather.id/
Summer of Shipping has a barebones website up: https://summerofshipping.com/
We continue to improve both, and while writing the Software Mentor newsletter.
If you’re curious, we also demoed Feather at our Summer of Shipping Thursday Meeting. You can watch it on YouTube (Feather demo starts at 40:20)
Lastly, the Athens project has taught me a few things about how to structure the Summer of Shipping Discord and what a successful communication model looks like for a large open “project”. Participation in online communities really does follow a power law (must lurk, some contribute).
Miscellaneous
🏮 I forgot to mention it last week, but it’s Asian and Pacific American Heritage Month! Over the last few years, I’ve developed a tradition of reading a book that expands my understanding of race and/or being Asian American in May. This year, I’m reading Pachinko - and just about 12% in and it’s Certified Fresh. 🍅
🍁 It’s summer, but looking ahead, it seems like some universities are going to continue to stay remote for the fall semester (McGill, the entire CSU system). I wonder how many are going to follow suit.
Alright, that’s all for this week.
Stay safe!
Phil