 what's happening. I'm Jessica Jordan. It doesn't really matter if you're a software engineer, project manager, a team lead or the founder of a company. If you're interested in moving yourself forward professionally, your team or your business, this talk is exactly for you. You will take a look at strategies we can employ to tap into the potential of open source and also to which extent doing so will actually benefit us. And that's what at least by the end of the talk you might actually realize that investing in Ember is the best business decision you're gonna make this year. But before we talk about investment and all of this stuff, let's talk about Ember and what actually brings me here to talk about this. Several years ago when I was trying to take the next step in my learning journey as a web developer and as front-end engineer, I found that there was a very interesting concept I want to get more into which was all about building single-page applications. And back then those are still kind of like a big and new thing. And I found Ember to be quite promising in this regard because it had the slogan, this idea that I was actually able to build large scaled and maintainable web applications using this framework. And I found it really interesting and exciting for its strong conventions that it had and having the feeling that I can build on top of the foundation of patterns and paradigms that have been better tested by a global community. Also the feeling that the user interface and develop experience was quite modern with the CLI which was still a very new thing back then. I had the feeling to be very productive and could get my things kind of like out of the gate rather easily and also have the feeling that the framework actually developed itself and undertook some evolution throughout the years was also what waited worth staying for me. Specifically in regards to looking at the recent Ember Octane release, I think it is not an understatement to say Ember is the modern framework. And last but not least, maybe one of the things that I found really, really intriguing when I just started learning Ember was to learn much more about open source. And why was this so interesting to me? Why was open source such a big deal? I think just like with learning Ember, I really realize how much of a gain changer this actually was. The ability that you as an engineer could actually go into get up and really look into the source code of for example Ember and then even if you run this kind of person who actually read the source code like from the top to the bottom, even just like looking at some of the bits of it, it kind of made you feel that you got better understanding how it works under the hood and that maybe you could use some of these bits and pieces of knowledge to build better web applications based on Ember. This was a really big thing for me at least back then and I think to this day it still is for a lot of software engineers to have this idea that if you use open source, you have a lot of power and control and the knowledge what you actually build your applications and your other software on top of. It's not only about the public source code, it's also about things like depending on the license that you can modify and redistribute the software and maybe try out ideas in the open source community by doing so and also the fact that documentation tends to be rather high quality because it is also openly developed with a group of peers from all across the globe. So open source on an individual software level, software engineer level is actually quite a really nice thing, really appreciated but now let's take it a step further. Like what does it actually mean in a business context? Are there like any benefits? Are there any values for businesses and companies to use open source? I want to share a story with you to illustrate some of the ideas behind that. In a research paper by Fitzgerald Carrey from 2003 called open source software in the trenches lessons from a large-scale OSS implementation they had a look at the deployment of open source strategy at a public large-scale health sector organization in Dublin, Ireland the Bermont hospital and the case study they found a very interesting incentive of the SET hospital to implement open source in their own IT infrastructure. By the end of 2002 the management found themselves in a budgetary shortfall of 17 million euro, quite a lot of money and they wanted to find a way around that to actually solve this problem. One idea was to reallocate the expenses in the IT department and i can tell you from the research and the analysis that you did the findings were actually quite surprising. So they took a look what they currently already spent and they found that there were a couple of proprietary commercial solutions that they were using that kind of like cost a bit of money and to get them working and to get the infrastructure running. So for example for email services they paid 100,000 euro every single year to maintain the infrastructure for around 3,000 staff members back at the time. This is not so much the interesting part yet the interesting part is now to look at a comparison that they did back then with valuable solutions or alternatives from the open source realm that they could use instead of this proprietary solutions they already used and spend so much money for. What they found is actually quite dramatic. They found that using open source software solutions similar to what they wanted to achieve with their email services they could possibly actually put the expenses down by 100,000 euro. Quite a lot of savings isn't it and it doesn't end here with emails. It's also about desktop apps, content management services and app service that they'll be using in the IT infrastructure. And even here compared with open source software based solutions they found a potential saving potential of over 100k, 100k and like 300k respectively. And also last but not least a really big cost factor at the hospital imaging and because this is used for diagnostics and actually quite critical for the business operation of a hospital this is of course also cost factor where you cannot really kind of like try to bring down the price. You just like pay as much as you need and this is also maybe one of the reasons why this is such a tremendous cost factor in the IT department. With almost 4.2 million euro every single year it has been quite a contributing factor to the budgetary problems that the organization faced. And even here in this very specific example X-ray digital imaging technology you can imagine how small the community is. It actually tries to distribute software around this. Even there they could actually find OSS based components that would help them to make savings. And also here the saving potential is quite drastic. They found using open source they might actually have another potential for savings of over 4.15 million. All of this costs and savings actually add up. So they calculated that for the first year of implementation of open source software solutions they might have a saving potential of 4.75 million euro and over five years calculating all the maintenance costs, renewing subscriptions for commercial services. They also found that here they had an immense saving potential of 8.17 million euro. And just to give you an idea of what 8.17 million euro means because at least I personally after 1 million euro I don't understand what this number means anymore. For an organization in Dublin Ireland this way never means paying the average salary of 48 medical scientists or a group of 27 doctors or a group of 36 nurses for another five years. So quite a lot of money and also shows you how leveraging open source actually was the solution that the organization could actually choose to overcome the budget problem. And this idea that we can in the business context use open source for infrastructure or for products that we built on top of this is what we called open source acquisition acquiring open source and then oftentimes this also results in a lot of like benefits which includes the saving money maybe the most obvious potential that we get from using open source in a business but not the single one actually. To illustrate this I want to share a quote with you by Jim Sandlin the executive director of the Linux Foundation who also shared why he thinks businesses really catch on on his idea to use open source. He for example said, shared development is enabling faster development with higher quality lower costs. This is causing the software value chain to change. The idea here is that it's not only about being concerned about like your finances when using open source it's also about trying to create faster development cycles for products that are based on open source and making sure that by sharing the development even outside of organization the quality has to be higher because more people are actually trying to figure out what are the best solution for not only your specific use case but for a lot of people's different use cases and this inevitably actually makes the products better that they could ever have been by just developing them internally in a single organization. So this quality idea behind improving products is what makes open source acquisition also so attractive to a lot of businesses. And what you also mentioned that this is causing the software value chain to change sounds a little bit like as if this was like a far distant utopian future but actually it is not as you could probably already imagine as well from your own teams because in 2015 it was already found that 95 percent of modern digital products were actually based on open source software components and if we estimate that this development actually continued up until 2020 we can also imagine that nowadays it is safe to say that every single business every kind of like operating organization is actually based on open source and is using open source for its own benefit. This idea of open source acquisition so is kind of like rather common and kind of like well understood but what if i told you that this is not even trying to fully embrace the potential of what open source could do to businesses what if i told you this is just the tip of the iceberg and that the full potential of open source is not even kind of like touched yet or talked about yet when we talk about better products and trying to save money by using open source so now you wonder what is this underbelly of this iceberg what is this untapped potential we would take a look at this in just a bit but let's first of all take a look at an interesting interview series we did at the ember times newsletter which if you haven't subscribed yet you should totally do that just right now go to gitbits and get the subscription going join us also and support ember times on the discord okay this is really the end of of the elevator pitch but anyways we did an interview series and we tried to talk with different community members about their motivations and also the interest to contribute to ember and be part of the group we also talked with jen weber who is an ember core learning team member ember frame framework core team member who also gave this excellent keynote um just uh earlier here at virtual ember conf and who talked with us also about her intrinsic motivations to contribute to ember and she said that contributing to ember is really fun i started by writing but the chance to learn from others was what really made a worth staying the things that i've learned from other people by participating here helped me my job every day and not just on the code front even on the team dynamic level leadership strategies and best practices many of the things that she talks about don't have anything to do with the fact that she's trying to use open source so she can save money it's about a whole other theory of how we can leverage open source and businesses this is not only about acquiring it it's also about integrating open source in a more holistic way and trying to find other ways to interact with it the sort of process of giving back to projects to contribute to it and see which kind of benefits you can get for it is what we call open source integration and this is also something that's actually very relevant for businesses but sometimes not as well understood as open source acquisition because there are many different levels that open source integration can help businesses and organizations both on the team individual and also on the whole scale large-scale business level one example that we can think of by listening to the interview just earlier was oops one moment please here we go sorry about that one thing that we thought about when we think about OSS integration is the fact that engineers who actually contribute to open source have another and very significant way to improve their own skills in many different areas be it technical skills learning a new program language getting like more internet knowledge of libraries or frameworks that they're using or be it organizational skills trying to lead initiatives in the community for example writing rcs or trying to lead new efforts for example really design of a website to bring them to life and to bring back these kind of skills that have been honed in remote collaboration with peers all around the world into your own organization where they can also be very beneficial it's all about thinking of it more of a way to try and to provide the room and the space for engineers who are already working on their teams to nurture their own excellence that they already have and to really fulfill the new full potential and last but least also if you think about it from this way what does it actually mean if an engineer can really work on something that they share values with what if an engineer really feels that having a real impact not only on a product that is developed internally but on something that is used by organizations all around the world and that can have like a real pragmatic use case and be a real solution out there is something that they believe value and can give them also another sense of fulfillment that might even exceed their fulfillment in their day-to-day job if you think about this way we can also think about that this is some nourishment we can provide to teams to engineers and to our business by providing this sense of fulfillment and work satisfaction and of course this is not the end of the story oftentimes if you're involved in hiring processes at all you find yourself in a situation where you want to grow your team another time and then you say to yourself and you have like a job ad out there that says something along the lines of that you're looking for a senior JavaScript engineer they should have at least like five years experience with ember maybe it should be driven motivated self-starter have a can-do attitude the list goes on and on and at the end of the day you might actually find a lot of like great candidates that really fit this profile really nicely and you're already doing a great job to get all of these great people potentially getting on to your team and creating great work but then at one kind of like blocker which is all about them also kind of like interviewing with a lot of other places and then realizing I am actually not really confident yet if I should really go with company X or not company Y and if you are company X you kind of like now realize yeah this is actually quite frustrating you spend a lot of like time and money into hiring processes and sometimes it really just doesn't work out because the demand for skilled workers, knowledge workers is really high and it's actually not so clear yet how to get this competitive edge at the very end of a talent process to get people to really confidently say I want to be here and what if I now told you that even in this very specific aspect of your business open source can actually play a crucial role what if I told you that an open source integrated talent strategy is something that actually can give you this competitive edge that you're looking for let's take a look how this could actually play out so imagine you actually accept the fact that this could be the key to your talent strategy success and you implement an open source strategy we'll take a look later on how this could look like in practice just assume this for now what you might find is that especially these people who already contributed open source that find a lot of like value and contributed it in their paid work time at your company got an increased sense of fulfillment or work satisfaction because you can actually adhere to your own interests rather easily by choosing 3D work on open source projects what you might find out of this as well that talent retainment is a bit easier to do in your company as well just because work satisfaction increase and what you get out of this as well might be that especially if your engineers are really involved in open source communities that they reach out to other engineers rather automatically by working on any kind of projects and that this kind of network that they're creating has also something that can later on help you in a talent acquisition process by being able to actually proactively reach out to other skilled engineers that already have the skill set that you are looking for by being involved in the same open source community as your engineers are already in you actually have the chance to provide opportunities to people who are maybe looking for the next career steps months or years from now and thinking about these five key steps of your talent strategy and how it plays into open source is something that you could also keep in mind and might be kind of like the convincing factor for you already but even after this even after kind of like highlighting how attracting talent retain talent might be something that's really great for you and how open source can play a role you might still kind of like think to yourself well like honestly sounds already great in theory but like in practice how does it really work you're a small company you have a lot of deadlines we work in a very fast-paced environment you don't have the time and the money to actually do one of this just like another thing that actually distracts us from our core business and honestly I believe you actually have the best idea what is best for your business because you are actually part of it and you know how it actually works and what restrictions you have to deal with on a day-to-day basis so this part of the talk is not all about trying to convince you what is right and wrong it's more about giving you ideas what you could employ and what you could leave out depending on what you really need and maybe there's some things that I show you right now in an example of how open source could look like in practice that are valuable for you maybe they're not but just keep an open mind and see if there's something that you could take away from when we talk about how open source can look like in action and practice by the examples of different strategies in real life businesses this example I want to highlight one strategy at a company that I know quite well because I worked there for almost three years which is Simplab's consultancy based in Munich we're also very involved in the ML community and here for example we also really value to find a way to integrate open source into our actual work and not have it only just like as a side asset and here we try to leverage the 20% time method if you're not familiar with it it's the idea that you have like one day per week so 20% time per single week available for working on source be it co-contributions, preparation of conference talks, writing blog posts or be it also organizing community events and for the rest of the time you actually work on your core business for example in our case working on client projects the great thing is about this as well how we try to do it with the 20% time that by the way that we already balanced it we can also give equal opportunity of this time to everyone so every engineer every designer can actually leverage it and work on their own interesting projects that they find last but at least we also want to make sure that they actually get tangible outcomes out of this 20% time and so these outcomes should be shared either with the team or with the wider community and I think it's an understatement to say that the 20% time and being able to work on open source at Simplabs had a significant impact I think it is maybe one of the outstanding factors of our company so far to be able to have a lot of like great projects out there that actually hallmarks of our work in the community including over a dozen javascript tools for example and by SimplabOrth or CleanItDom who help developers all around the world in their day-to-day businesses to create great web applications and yeah maybe you also see from this that these benefits are real and this is also something you could consider for your own business but that's what at least at the end of the day if you think about investing if you think about investing on source or like an ember you still have to figure out how will you actually do it because depending on how you invested it will actually be a real success or it might be more of a very expensive investment that you don't get so many returns from so how will you know where to invest yeah first of all understand what your businesses are and try to tailor and cater to them and thinking about areas that you want to improve and be a product development or training or branding you might want to employ different strategies either with short mid-term or long-term returns so let's take a look at some very specific examples of needs that you want to meet in your business so you can actually choose the right strategy for the specific need when you try to develop an OSS integrated strategy at your business so for example you had the need to fix your product did you actually know that sometimes when your engineer actually stumbles upon like a bug fix that you pay them to fix so your product can be sold to your customers again it's sometimes not only about try to monkey patch this bug in the actual application code sometimes it's a bug that actually originates from a third-party library or it's just because a third-party library doesn't have a feature yet that could actually be available and would help you to fix the bug in the application and in this specific case for example it's actually rather easy for the engineer to say well i'm not gonna monkey patches in the app i'm actually gonna provide an upstream bug fix so a bug fix that actually fixes the third-party library and in turn will automatically fix your application with the next release offset library and they are actually able to work on this without any kind of like extra money or effort expanded from your side and this is really great for us to offer a product level of course because you just want to fix the bugs and this is what you want in the first place but also it's a great time training opportunity for any developers working on this because they actually get to see other great insights into the libraries that they're using and this knowledge might be beneficial weeks or months from now so something to keep in mind if you just want to have like some kind of like short term open source integration wins you can for example ask engineers to try to do upstream bug fixes wherever possible if you're really looking forward to improve the quality of your products there are also different ways just meant we had like an internal library or functionality that you could rather easily externalize and actually make an open source add-on on an open source project and all kinds of people from all around other organizations could actually help you to improve it the great thing is once you actually share the development it's usually much much easier to kind of like identify use cases that are very interesting for the functionality or the project that you're open sourcing that you haven't been aware of before and to also help you identify and fix bugs and fix them much quicker than if you would have continued with the development entirely so if you go with this route for example you realize okay it's actually quite a little bit of investment to kind of like get something generic enough so it can be an open source project we have to invest a little bit of engineering time to do that but once we've done this it's actually like a very great return for us on the product development side and last but not least also on the branding side other engineers or other organization are using your own source project you name us gonna be out there for engineering teams and this is really great for your kind of like marketing strategy here as well so great wins in the mid and the long term and last but not least especially if you're like a small mid-signal and you as a company can only grow with the help and support from others and this is what you want to nourish as good as possible and if you imagine or kind of like have this point of view of tech user groups actually really fulfilling the need then this is something you should definitely look into just imagine you had like your own local user group for ember developers in your own town or maybe your sponsor or host event from an already existing user group every now and then the effects that you have a manifold first of all you have opportunity to co-network with a lot of other engineers or organization around the area that are also using the same technologies as yours and also you get an added benefit of branding because when you for example sponsor when you for example host people will remember your name and this is something that can pay off already weeks months sometimes years from now so here also great benefits that you get in the long term both on the branding and the talent strategy side and which should also not be underestimated especially for the talent strategy where you know as a tech company might sometimes take quite a long time to hire someone so why not invest today and then get the benefits from it a couple months or a year from now so something to your mind support your local ember meetup and there are many different ways that companies contribute to open source right now so if you for example like a smaller company you might kind of try to tend to do more short-term investments for example these upstream bug fixes that I talked about or trying to collaborate on open source projects that you're already using because it's rather easy to invest and stop the investment and go from there but especially if you're like a large organization maybe like more than 10 000 staff members then you might realize that for example having stakeholdership positions and projects trying to help open source projects to fill the roadmap and to pace them through it with the features that are relevant for your own business product is something that you would really value and yeah to give you some confidence well if you're maybe already there to to make the choice yeah okay maybe I should look into open source and how we can deploy this in our business I want to show you in great company especially in the ember community which is a framework or a project that is not backed by one single big company by a lot of like different companies and organization and individual contributors that come together to shape the product you are in yeah as I said very great company and looking at a lot of like small mid and larger sized companies you might also find very similar strategies that you can adapt for your own business and yeah with this I think you have like a better understanding how this could actually play out and that higher quality products more secure products but also more effective and excellent teams as well as the competitive ads that you get in sales and also your talent strategy by employing open source in your business are the things that actually give this multiplied business impact that is larger than just the sum of its parts and yeah I think you had a great time to kind of like get a little bit like when inside together with me into open source and what it means in the and by ecosystem specifically and maybe at this point you might yeah point a little bit and actually come to the conclusion that you can now actually make a really great business for business decision for itself maybe even the best by investing in amber and with this I would like to thank you again I'm a senior software engineering consultant at Simflabs if you want to learn more about what we're up to there feel free to reach out to me at discord or on twitter also at ember learning quality member member of the ember times and an ember jazz Berlin organizer if you ever interested in contributing to open source either with our learning team efforts or with the newsletter feel free to reach out and if you ever in Berlin please pop by our local user group and last but not least thank you so much for listening to me and wishing you a very great time at ember conf