Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

Aaron Boodman on Twitter / X

There is this tension in dev tooling right now: Lots of people want to self-host, and not depend on a service. Lots of people also want the vibes of open source - being part of an open development community, having the code, etc.But builders still need to make a living...— Aaron Boodman (@aboodman) January 23, 2024

Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open S…

An inside look at modern open source software developer…

Cracks in Containerized Development

Nerd rants about developing software in isolation from the home system; toolbx, distrobox, devcontainers, nix, etc

Creating and growing healthy community open source projects [PLoP 2020]

Abstract: This article presents a succinct and minimal handbook of best practices of how to create and grow community open source projects. We start with the assumption that the handbook’s user has…

The Missing Middle of Open Source

Why serious, maintainer-driven projects struggle to sustain themselves—and what it will take to fix it.

Local-First Landscape

A podcast about local-first software development.

From Volunteer Gardening to Building Next-Gen Distributed Web Apps: My Journey to Holochain App…

A story about discovering community, a mind-warping internet paradigm and a global network of unconventional software engineers.

A New Wave of Peer-to-Peer Apps Heralds a Farm-to-Table Internet

This week, we discuss the local-first computing movement and its push to reduce our reliance on the corporate-owned, cloud-based software tools we use every day.

Keep Your Friends Close — Open Tech Strategies | Blog

One of the insider secrets of free and open source software (FOSS) is that most of the rules a project uses on a day-to-day basis are not found in the software’s license. There are contribution guidelines, which are enforced by the project only taking contributions that meet them. There are codes of conduct, which are a condition of community participation. There are endorsements, official membership, a voice in setting the project roadmap, and all kinds of other benefits that attach to varying types of community participation. In each case, entirely external to the license, there are official rules and unwritten norms that govern how participants gain the benefits of joining the civic life of a project.

How Do Individual Contributors Get Stuck? A Primer

Technology, startups, programming, technical management and software architecture

The Architecture Of Local-First Web Development — Smashing Magazine

An honest perspective on building local-first web apps in 2026, written for developers who’ve been doing this long enough to be skeptical of silver bullets.

Local-First Software: Origins And Evolution

Developer interest in local-first software is continuing to grow rapidly in 2024. At the same time, it’s also apparent that developers currently have different views on what they consider to be ‘local-first software’, ranging from narrower to broader definitions. This prompted us to take a closer look at the origins and evolution of local-first.

Twelve tips for growing communities around your open source project | Ben Balter

Publishing code isn't enough. Twelve practical tips to attract users, welcome contributors, and grow a healthy open source community.

Ten FOSS Development Fallacies For User Facing Software

This is a list, inspired by the Five Geek Social Fallacies, of common patterns or behaviours that developers of free/open source software (FOSS) fall into when they try to develop software for users who are not technical, or for whom non-technical users would be the most obvious userbase. Hopefully writing these down (which frankly is cathartic more than anything) is helpful to some in recognising these thought patterns and avoiding them when developing software - I’ve got some of my own thoughts on this at the bottom.