 Hi, this is Stu Miniman with Wikibon here in Cambridge, Massachusetts talking about open source. Joining me for this segment is Matt Ponds, a full stack developer. Matt, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. All right. So Matt, we were talking off camera about, you know, just how, I mean, open source has been around for a while now, but you know, the relevance, you know, in the community overall and, you know, how fast things are changing. Can you give us just a little bit of background, you know, what you do, how you first got involved in, you know, using and then contributing with open source? Sure. So right now I'm, like you said, a full stack developer, taking on freelance projects primarily in Rails, which is back to Ruby. Got my start two summers ago. I had no background in technology and background in programming. Remain was using it for some defense contracts and I thought, hey, this is a cool tool. The vagrant is the tool I used. I'll take a shot. And after that, started programming my own. But then it was really the open source part of it that really got me hooked on the community aspect, you know. So first of all, you full stack developer, for those that aren't familiar, what it's pretty common term, but, you know, what is a full stack developer? So basically, I just handle everything. If you are calling that idea, I'll take you from the designer actual website, which the end user will see to the back end, which encompasses the database, the load balancers, the servers. So basically all the notes and bolts that make the pretty things of the user sees actually work. All right. Well, you know, I think back, you know, I show my age a little bit, but, you know, back in the 90s, I showed my wife the internet and she got, you know, a job. We taught ourselves HTML and actually worked for some of the hospitals here in Boston doing website development. And then there were the people that, once she did kind of the front end and the layout, she handed it off to people that did the back end. You know, it's a whole lot bigger ecosystem now and you've got things like, you know, where he hosted is just rack space is at AWS. So, you know, you say end to end, you know, what are kind of the common tools that you're using? What are the decision points they need to make? You know, it looked at people at home, probably look, it's like, oh, there's a commercial for like, buildyourwebsite.com. Isn't it really simple? I mean, I guess if that's the site you want with those limited tools, it's very simple. But my biggest tool that I use right now is a tool Ansible, which provisions my back end with YAML files. I put in how I want my server to be spun up, how many nodes, and that pretty much takes care of all the back ends. So right now, one of the stacks I develop on is a rail stack. So that's Postgres as my database, Nginx server for my web server, and then Ruby on Rails as my front end. All right. So Matt, you said you didn't come from kind of a technology background. You know, how fast did you learn these things? You know, every time you learn something new or there's seven new tools and operating systems you need to walk us through a little bit about your journey? Sure. Well, it was Vagrant that really allowed me to play around. I'm sure your listeners and viewers know, maybe they don't, but with Vagrant, I can spin up a virtual machine and break it pretty quickly at first, and then actually pay for your computer. And I thought that was great. The learning by doing is just how I learn personally. So having the opportunity to get in there and actually build these things by hand really led to my development. I started with Code Academy, which is great for a taste, but I remember that moment, you know, finishing my lessons in Code Academy and actually turning to the computer to try and do what I just learned. And, you know, we talked about not having a back end, but I couldn't do anything. Like, I might know how to break that program, but I couldn't actually get it to work without having the actual development background. All right. So you said Vagrant is what, you know, one of the main tools you use. You know, what's your interaction with kind of Vagrant, the code, the community? What do you contribute? You know, why do you contribute? So my main contribution is I've actually come from Packer, which is a tool made to work with Vagrant, which creates the boxes of my development environments. But those I've opened a few GitHub issues contributed to those conversations that kind of flesh out bugs. I was having an issue while creating snapshots on Digital Ocean, getting my server up and running. And they were just so fast to respond to me and to help me walk my way through the mistakes I was making. So that's really in stack overflow. That's been a godsend for me. All right. How so? Well, once you hit a wall with something so new for me, I don't know what to do. I have to debug. But with stack overflow, every issue I've had, someone's probably already had it. And so by going on stack overflow, I can find those issues, try out their code, maybe they posted a gist or a paste in file that I can take a look at. And once I kind of mess around with that, usually it works. All right. Yeah. We were talking to Matt Brender earlier and he was saying, some of the kind of bug fix is something that you post bugs, maybe you help fix bugs. Beyond that, are there features that you ask for? What's the interaction you have there? I haven't actually requested any features yet. When you're walking into this new world, there's so much out there that I still kind of parse my way through. But coming from a background of not having technology, I can say that I believe it's about building momentum. What I like about the open source community is that it is not just open source in terms of contributing bugs, but it's a very welcoming and helpful community. It's tough to get over that first hurdle, making that first, opening that first issue, posting that first pull request. But once you start getting there, I think it builds on itself. All right. So to ask you a little bit, your clients, how familiar are they? Do they know the tools you're using and they're familiar with open source? Is part of it? No. It's magic internet tubes and they want a product. They have no idea what it takes to build that and they just want it. Yeah, it's interesting. We were looking, there's a survey that came out last week talking about the future of open source. And if you just went back a few years ago and if people said, oh, there's open source in there, maybe I don't trust it, maybe it's not secure. And at least the hypothesis is that today, actually, people are actually saying, is that open source? Because I understand that it might give me some flexibility. It's more likely to be a little bit more secure. Does that resonate with you? Yeah. I mean, I only develop with open source tools because I trust the community to have them backed. And now that you have services like Travis CI, Jenkins, you can actually see them working before you actually include in your project. I think that's a huge help for me. All right. So, can you talk a little bit about what do you think about when you look at your career, your involvement in these tools? Is get part of your resume now going forward or? I think it has to be for anyone who's passionate or wants to be taken serious in this industry. If you can't work with people either remotely or either remotely or just show your incremental improvements in your files, then I don't think about getting really participate. All right. What about the community itself? Are you active in meetups? You know, how do you find out new things? Where do you learn from? Well, I actually run my own maker meetup in Boston. And I participate in the Boston DevOps meetups. And that's really where I get most of my interactions with some murdering tools that is going to whiten the dogs, hearing people. So, DevOps, I'm curious, what's the general feel? Do your parents know what DevOps is? Yeah, exactly. I think my mother said, oh, I hear about this cloud thing on NPR, and you were telling me about it five years ago, at least. So, what's the general atmosphere? We've been talking about it in the community for a few years now. Lots of big companies embracing it. I know when I go to conferences, there's now even developer areas inside the show. What's your take on it? I don't know if you're a sports guy, but in baseball, we always like to say on the cube, what inning is the pitcher warming up? Are we in the early innings? Where are we in the DevOps discussion? Oh, man, I honestly don't know if I'm the best person to ask, but are we in college ball right now? We're still getting ready before it kind of takes over. All right. So, one more personal question for you here. So, you're from San Diego. I know we had a rough winter, but what is the climate here, Cambridge, Boston area, in the community here? What would you say to people if they were looking to come participate, getting out of college, or moving a company here? What would your advice be about this community? Well, I mean, I actually grew up here. I would say there's maybe no better spot than if you can live through the winters. There's no better spot than Boston. There will be a lot of competition from San Francisco, but with the education back on what you have here, MIT, Harvard, BC, BU, the talent pool, the international community that's growing here, the access to capital here I've found has also been on par with the University of the United States. So, if you're just in looking, you don't mind a slight winter here and there. This is the area. Yeah, well, Matt, you said you're in the South Shore. There's still a little bit of snow piles here, even though it is spring, you know, baseball season started and yeah, but great. If somebody wanted to find you, you active on some of the social media sites, website, you know, what's your digits? How do people find you? Well, you can find me on Twitter at Matt P182. That's probably the best place to find me right now. All right. Hey, Matt, appreciate so much joining us for this segment. You know, really love digging into this with you, and thank you for watching.