 Hi, this is Stu Miniman with wikibond.com, here at the work bar in Cambridge, Massachusetts, digging into some of the areas of open source contributors, coding, and joining me really are my, you know, advocate for this session is the developer advocate from Bashow. Matt Brender. Matt, thank you for joining me. My pleasure, Stu. Thanks for having me. So, you know, Matt, you know, I've had you're a podcaster, you're heavily active in the community, doing a lot with the meetups, and for some reason I don't know how you haven't been on the Cube yet, so thank you so much. Welcome to the community. You'll be a Cube alumni after this. Honored to be joining the ranks. All right. And so, you know, the reason that we kick this off actually is, you know, we're heading into the spring season. There's lots of events going on, and we know that open source is having a greater and greater impact on what's happening in the community today, a quote you hear sometimes as software is eating the world and open source is eating software. And as that, there was actually a new survey that came out last week called the future of open source, excuse me, and that really looked at, you know, it was a couple of thousand people, what companies are doing, who's contributing and the like. So I wanted to start, Matt, get some of your feedback on what we saw there. The actual, the webcast of the event was held here in Cambridge. I think it was North Lakes, I believe is the venture, and Black Duck is a company that helps companies understand what they're doing with open source and manage that environment. So let's start with the survey if we can. You know, open source has been around for, I mean, a couple of decades now. It's not new, but really feel that in the last few years, it's hitting a new inflection point. More companies are using it, and more importantly, more companies are contributing to it. So if I say, if I say to you that, you know, it's now 64% of companies are contributing to open source, does that resonate with you? What's your feedback from what you say? Yeah, absolutely. When you say 64%, I just think, wow, I think there's a 36% of people that didn't get polled correctly, because whether you realize it or not, a big chunk of what is contributing to people's productivity and ability to develop the new application stack, which is very integrated and layered and modular, people, if they're not directly taking open source and integrating it, they're being inspired by the way open source is progressing and using those heuristics and algorithms in their own work. Yeah, I mean, another stat that was interesting, it said, you know, how many companies are actually using open source? I think high 60s, low 70s, I don't remember the number, but the counter to that is how many companies say they aren't using open source was like 3%. So we know that is everywhere, I mean, we were chatting earlier about, you know, if it wasn't for things like Linux, you know, Google wouldn't be here today. So, you know, how important is open source to companies that you talked to? I mean, if one way of taking a look at that is to think about how ever present it is in our conversation in industries that haven't always been speaking about open source. So open source, you know, there's certainly a lot of presence in the front end web development world. It's been a large part of the conversation and then the operating system layer, you know, with Linux and far before even, but what's really fascinating to me is to see this trickling into the enterprise IT land, in particular, I mean, VMware has open source projects available now including Photon, which is getting, I'm happy to say more of the early people that opened a pull request against Photon trying to add some value to the ecosystem and just every big tech company and Docker is just the absolute like presence there. Anyone that is evolving in a large scale, they're growing through this large ecosystem of users online and, you know, that is all kind of taken under the phrase open source. Yeah, so, you know, my background is heavily on the infrastructure side. I'm a networking guy at heart and standards were what defined so much of what we used in enterprise IT for the longest time. And one of the challenges is standards. They take a long time to develop. There was always that argument of, is it proprietary? Is it standard area? Can we wait for the standards to come in and get? And open source is very different. It's more about it's about speed, it's about collaboration. It's about, you know, delivering value back to the companies that are participating in any comments on that? Well, yeah, you said it from a particular angle. You said it from like the value is in the company is getting a return in some sense of technical skill. I like to, I mean, as a developer advocate in particular, I focus on the individual. And the more individuals I speak with that are either contributing to the React community that Bash was a part of or to a broader ecosystem, they generally have some skin in the game, but they want to give back and they want to increase their skills and learn from others. So the collection of those different assets or those different intentions adds up into something that's incredibly valuable to companies that can foster it well. All right, so Matt, let's tell our audience a little bit of a story here. You know, you yourself started out kind of, you know, computer programming is what you studied undergrad, but it was a while between that and when you, you know, really became, you know, heavily involved in this developer community, can you give us a little bit of that story? Absolutely, yeah, the nonlinear career path comes to mind as we talk about this. Yeah, on your podcast, Keith whispers, we said they are all nonlinear, right? Yes, exactly. So I studied computer science in college, mostly just because I found it interesting that when you code something correctly, it works. And your computer does something that it couldn't do before. And I just, I love that creation period. I think there's a maker deep down inside of me that loves to do that. But I found the closer I got to graduation, the less interested I got in development because it was, you know, low level kernel hacking type programming, a lot of compilers and going to work for a manufacturer where you're just sitting in a cube all day. It was an isolating career path from what it looked like as a college student. So I actually pursued infrastructure because of CIS administration and the community behind CIS administration. And that led me down a path where I got to meet incredible people like yourself in the virtualization community, which is fundamentally a group of people that are all making each other better at something. What I'm really happy about right now is that I see that up and down the stack these days. And that's why I'm getting closer and closer to developers because we're all developers. Anyone that has been writing a script for an application is a developer in a sense of the phrase. And they're building something that they can share. And what I really love is that that isolating sense of what it meant to be a coder professionally has evaporated. That's no longer there's lone wolf programmers in the wild, or if there are, they're working on their own and then selling something. Most people are coding collaboratively. And it's about how you communicate with others as you're building code. And I love that change of pace from the individual creating their own thing and that's all that matters. And I don't need to communicate well to others to it being fundamentally a communication problem. Yeah, it's real interesting. I think about when I was blogging personally or being part of the VMware community, a lot of times you're taking your own time. You're helping participate as part of the community. What's that kind of internal equation, though, of how do I spend? Time is hugely valuable. I mean, it's all about time or money, right? And from a company standpoint, too. So how do most people that you talk to, how do they make that decision that this is a path I want to do? This is something that either I'm doing partially for work or on my own? And what is that, Max? It's hard to summarize a lot of different people's approach, but I have to think of the one theme that runs through all the stories that have come across is a classic Tim O'Reilly quote of what the goal of O'Reilly media is, which is to provide more value than you're capturing. And I think that's what drives people. It's that they're looking for value themselves. Everyone wants to build a skill set, build a career, build some sort of talent, or maybe just give that happy feeling of knowing that you helped somebody that day. So were you saying that there's just karma in the natural IT world and we give back and some of it will come, or am I missing the point? No, I think you're missing the point. I think it's very intentional, actually, that people are doing something for themselves first, like maybe you're an infrastructure person that is now familiar with coding in Ruby and you want to start using Chef to automate your infrastructure. You don't know how to do that stuff by normally, but people, you get on GitHub and you start searching and you find a bunch of code that does exactly what you want it to do. That was ultimately like a selfish need. But I think a lot of people have that moment where they're like, oh, I get it a little bit more, that's great. Now, how do I add my own value to this? Or how do I keep giving back to it? Because it's a mutually beneficial equation there. Yeah, so if I can unpack that a little bit, I think of, say, let's take Salesforce, an example. Great SaaS company. One of the huge values that they had is if a company asked for a feature and they would develop it and then anybody could use it. So it's kind of that shared wisdom. And we can take those pieces together. Is it building on that? Or once again, are we missing a piece? No, that's an element of it. I think what's interesting is it's difficult to unpack all the complexities. So there is that element of somebody building a tool that benefits themselves and then they give it to this other kind of group, Salesforce in this case, and then they standardize it across others. Why did that person want to do that? Well, the great opportunity there is by giving that code to a larger organization, you have a broader audience of people that can collaborate and build it and improve it, thus improving your own investment without taking more cycles out of your time. So it's that idea that if you build it for yourself, others may use it. And if they start adding to that adding value on top of your value, it will also benefit you. So it's not just out of the kindness of our hearts that we're throwing code on the internet. No, I get it. Yeah, it certainly is. So Matt, you've been spending a lot of time with the meetup communities. Probably lots of people know meetups from kind of personal standpoint. Everything from my wife is used for exercise or getting kids together. But from a developer and a coding standpoint, talk about what's happening in meetups. And maybe a lot of our audience are probably familiar with kind of the Vmugs and regional user group type situations. Maybe you can give us a little compare contrast of the user group versus the meetup. Yeah, so think of early day user groups as a nice wide breadth understanding of what a lot of these meetups are. Like I think John Troyer on the Geek Whispers and well-known in the VMware community said it's a user group if you have more than one person in the room and a box of pizza. And that's very much a meetup at times. Like sometimes it's just a few people talking about some sort of coding aspect, whether it's about a programming language that they're passionate about, whether it's Python, Ruby, or new ones like Rust and Go, or whether it's more specific to an application that you're trying to build on. Apache Spark is very popular. Hadoop has a great following. We have react meetups all throughout the United States and Europe. These groups gather together, self-selecting, and then have some sort of food sponsor. That's always nice. Geeks gotta eat. And then it's centered around solving a problem usually. What's a common problem that we're all trying to fix and how do we get there? So it's not the full day event that you would get out of a user group these days, but there's something just very organic and beneficial to everyone out of it. All right, so we've got a lot that we need to cover, Matt, but I appreciate you're bringing in some people that are contributing in various aspects of the communities. For somebody that's just starting to look at this, I don't know, I haven't seen a mind map of what's out there, but you've got things like GitHub as the place where I can add and remove codes. There's so many projects, everything from Linux. We talked about things like Docker. Do you have a hierarchy that you look at as opposed to the tools, the big projects? I know I've seen on GitHub as some of the big projects that you want to get. Linux, Docker, OpenStack, or some of the infrastructure ones. Give us a quick rundown as to what you see today. I mean, I'm still learning constantly here, and so it's incredibly overwhelming to think like, I'm just gonna go to this project that I love, like OpenStack and work the repository and start coding and they'll accept my code, right? That's like, wait a minute, I haven't ever developed this before. So I think starting with iterative and small expectations, find people that share common interests, find something that you can fix right away, and just the basics is really you gotta understand how Git works. I think Git is a fundamental part of GitHub and the version control that allows you to have the distributed version control. Then on top of that, another thing that's constantly overlooked but has a little bit of a learning curve is markdown language. All the different texts that's on GitHub that's rendered nicely is done in markdown. So these are two incredibly, they seem trivial, but are really important base elements that if you try to jump right to being a great Ruby developer, you're going to be frustrated at trying to understand Git and markdown along the way. So start simple, meet some local people and start building some sort of something of value for yourself and for others and it'll take off from there. All right, well, Matt, we're gonna catch up with you a little bit later. Thanks so much. Good introduction to what we're gonna talk about today and cube on the ground, we'll be back with some more guests real soon. Thanks.