I know you are tired of COVID and social distancing. We all are. But — are you also tired of the old job? Ready to do something fun, learn something new, work with great people, AND serve open source community at large? Doesn’t get much better than that.
Perhaps you need to come work with us and join FOSSA!
What is FOSSA and Why I love it….
So, what is FOSSA?
FOSSA’s product ultimately answers the question: can your company legally use all of the dependencies that your developers pulled into your proprietary software over time, based on the licensing requirements of those dependencies, as well as their dependencies, and so on and so force.
From Fossa.com: As the only developer-native open source management platform, FOSSA has the broadest license inventory and vulnerabilities database available. Full integration with your existing CI/CD pipeline provides more complete, continuous visibility and actionable insight much earlier in the SDLC. For the first time, teams can collaboratively shift left and audit, analyze, control, and remediate OSS issues right in their existing workflows.
Here is a screenshot of FOSSA’s report on one of my personal Ruby Gems called Arli (Arduino Library Manager):
Why I joined FOSSA
I joined FOSSA in September 2020, after a couple of mismatched engagements with other companies I was ready for a new home. Despite having been looking for predominantly Ruby-based positions, I also wanted to keep an open mind, and explore positions that offered a learning experience along the way.
FOSSA did not have much Ruby work back then as their stack is predominately NodeJS / TypeScript, and the more recent stuff is Haskell and Go. But the attitude towards other languages is healthy, and I’ve been able to contribute in multiple areas, starting with a critical project to prevent a PostgreSQL Transaction ID Wraparound downtime on the primary database with only a few months left to spare, before this fate was knocking on our door.
Your Ego vs Continuous Learning
We all have an Ego. The earlier in life you can get rid of it (or at least — be aware of it), the better — the more likely you will challenge the Status Quo, the more likely you will engage in a Continuous Learning Practices, and continue making valuable contributions resulting in an outsized impact to your organization, perhaps paving the way to True Innovation.
While onboarding, I saw the opportunity to automate many of the manual tasks, and the result is a fully autonomous, interactive (or not) installer script that shrinks developer onboarding to under an hour that it takes to install everything.
| The onboarding script leans heavily on my open source BASH-programming framework Bashmatic, which will be introduced in detail in one of the future posts. In the meantime, those impatient are encouraged to grab the PDF Readme Document (3Mb) document. |
Scaling FOSSA
My first real project was to absorb the existing processes together with any inneficiencies and gently, politely nudge the engineering team into to a more productive processes, as I’ve done numerous times as a CTO.
What surprised me from the start was not just the lack of resistance to new proposals, but the complete open-mindedness of both the engineers and the management! There was some confusion around "what and how" Agile Methodologies work, so I wrote a Agile Process Blog Post as well as the internal Notion doc, summarizing nearly a decade of experience building web software with high-performance teams, leaning on how Pivotal Labs did it, and applying their techniques peace-meal to our own process.
Within weeks two teams adopted my proposed "Modified Pivotal Method", switched to Pivotal Tracker, and started doing weekly planners and retrospectives. No other company I’ve been at was so efficient at pondering, understanding, and ultimately deciding to adopt and reap the benefits of the new methods.
Open Source will Become You
As my friend and a colleague Bryan Cantrill said in the highly entertaining podcast, which we recorded together early this year, "…Open Source will Eat the World…".
This means only more work for companies like ours that help large corporations understand their legal and licensing requirements towards the components they use. The business model is solid, the team is phenomenal, and great things are yet to come.
 You can watch the video of the "podcast" on my YouTube Channel — Thanks Bryan! |
My LinkedIn Post
Below is little blurb I posted to LinkedIn — if you are interested, please email me directly at kigster AT gmail.com.
Open Positions
Please take a quick stroll through the open positions. If you like something, please email me your resume and we’ll take it from there.
Thanks!
