Allison Pike’s Post

This week for Once a Maintainer we spoke with NLP expert Sofie Van Landeghem, core maintainer of the popular open source NLP library spaCy. Sofie shared her thoughts on the evolution of NLP as applied to text mining for industry, how spaCy manages its roadmap, and why dependency management in python is so difficult. https://lnkd.in/eW55VZbe

We had a blast this week talking to Mike McQuaid, project leader and longest tenured maintainer of Homebrew 🍺 . We spoke with Mike about how he got into open source in the UK, his thoughts on how open source has evolved over the last 15 years, and why he still loves writing in Ruby. https://lnkd.in/eQud6WtX

I was told I need to add The Tortured Poets Department to my list of Taylor Swift albums and their corresponding programming languages. Here we go: Debut: Swift 🌻 Fearless: Java 💛 Speak now: C# 💜 RED: Ruby 🧣 1989: C 🕶 Reputation: Python 🐍 Lover: Go 🦋 Folklore: Rust 🍁 Evermore: Elixir 🌿 Midnights: Dark 🌃 TTPD: Perl 🤍 I quote: Being handed some Perl code is not debugging, where you figure out what is going wrong. It is a psychological thriller of deceit and despair, where you figure out what is going on at all. Perl code is a piece of art and self expression. Which are at least three things the average programmer is not qualified for.

This article by Lucas R. is quite long but makes some good points about how at the end of the day, open source software is created and maintained by people, and those people get burnt out sometimes, and they are mostly unpaid, and therefore it's actually quite incredible how secure OSS has been considering the odds. ..."open source is only as secure as the resources and people allocated to maintaining it. More often than not, FOSS projects have fewer eyes than they need, not more." https://lnkd.in/eYkW6G2M

This week's Once a Maintainer is a big one- we spoke with Rafael Mendonça França, Rails Core team member and Principal Engineer at Shopify. It was clear that Rafael is always thinking about how to move the entire Ruby and Rails ecosystem forward, balancing the needs of various stakeholders while committing to the core vision for the framework. https://lnkd.in/eTzhNB4D

another day, another article about the importance of open source dependency management, this one in Forbes https://lnkd.in/eSiGGmnS

I thoroughly enjoyed speaking with Armin Ronacher, creator of the Flask framework, about his thoughts on open source dependencies, licensing, and the role of the package index across various ecosystems. Super interesting discussion. https://lnkd.in/e2cdyN-F

Great, highly technical interview

This week's Once a Maintainer is with one of the hearts of the Rails community, Jeremy Smith. We talked about the moment he decided to double down on Rails, what inspired his podcast, and how he got his start as a developer helping Floridians pick out their palm trees. https://lnkd.in/e-wH-tYm