Much of my activity is browsable on my GitHub account page. As such, I am part of the honored group which has code buried deep in the Svalbard archipelago. So that’s pretty neat :).
- Hadoop (2008)
- Wavefront Agent (2015-2017)
- CPython (2022)
- Hobby Projects (2019-now)
- And to wrap up, participation
GNU, the cultural trend-setter for FOSS in a capitalist world.
Hadoop (2008)
I had a pleasant summer internship at Apple one year, researching if Hadoop could replace their in-house analytics for music recommendations on the iTunes store. It could not (or, at least, I could not ;). In the process I actively participated in a Hadoop mailing list. Mostly I was asking questions, but I occasionally helped others.
I’m not sure how much survives, but I did find one message from an online archive! Not even indexed by Google when you search my name. Talk about deep in the internet.
On Jul 22, 2008, at 12:22 PM, Mori Bellamy wrote:
> hey all,
> let us say that i have 3 boxes, A B and C. initially, map tasks are
> running on all 3. after most of the mapping is done, C is 32% done
> with reduce (so still copying stuff to its local disk) and A is
> stuck on a particularly long map-task (it got an ill-behaved record
> from the input splits). does A's intermediate map output data go
> directly to C's local disk, or is it still written to HDFS and
> therefore distributed amongst all the machines? also, will A's disk
> be a favored target for A's output bytes, or is the target volume
> independent of the corresponding mapper?
Wavefront Agent (2015-2017)
Wavefront is a metrics ingestion, monitoring, and alerting solution. It has been renamed a few times due to an acquisition.
I had an opportunity to contribute an open source open source parts of Wavefront: the Agent. Intelligent batching and encoding enables greater scale than more naive approaches.
I also had a hand in the creation and distribution of RPMs and DEBs for said agent.
My favorite contribution to FOSS during this time is actually my participation on a 8 year old (and presently unsolved) docker issue: TCP-RESET Packets are not masqueraded. At that time in my journey, diagnosing a heisenbug in a machine’s transport layer was a heavy lift. The issue is so subtle, it remains open for 8 years and counting, with someone chiming in once a year. It makes me ponder what “production quality” means, in a good way.
CPython (2022)
If you ever find yourself on Windows and you want to play a sound through your computer’s speakers, I hope you will find it somewhat easier than before
It’s a small contribution, but Python is so important to me that I want to show it off anyway!
Hobby Projects (2019-now)
Of course, we have some other project entries from this very blog.
GrayTabby is named after my cat. It’s a browser extension compliant with the WebExtensions API, formalized by Mozilla. While it was fun, its value was marginal, and eventually the History browsing experience of web browsers became good enough to obviate it.
Porygon was an absolutely engaging romp through the world of digital circuits and interfacing with them through GPIO. I shared it with Pyninsula in a talk. That was the talk I learned that excitement makes talks run long, and I really ought to practice talks in advance with timing in mind. Sorry to all attendees for going over :).
Platonic Game is a simple 2D platformer designed to help debug issues in Godot. It is already used in debugging crashes for in-browser games on OSX.
And to wrap up, participation
I think one of the overlooked things in open source participation is commenting on bug reports. The anecdata and code snippets you post there are part of a larger process in which everyone converges on something helpful to solve a complicated issue.