My OSS Plans for 2018

I’m going back to work tomorrow after a 2+ week break for the holidays. As quite a bit of my official job and self identity as a developer revolves around developing OSS tools, I’m taking a minute to write up what my goals and agenda is for the new year.

I’m looking to start pacing myself much better over the next year. I had the brilliant idea last year that I was going to try to sprint through and “finish” all the outstanding OSS work I had on my plate and spend the next year coasting. Long story short, that turned out to be a really bad idea that left me pretty burned out near the end of the year. This year I’m giving up on the idea that any of my OSS tools will ever truly be “done” and treat OSS work like an on and off again long distance race rather than a series of sprints.

So here’s my theoretical OSS work this year:

• Jasper — My immediate goal is to get an alpha released this week to start seeing if there’s any community interest. Immediately after that, my team will start doing a trial conversion of some of our applications at work to use Jasper. I’m not sure if this is going to be a big, OSS deal like FubuMVC in terms of my effort, or just something we built for work.
• Marten — I mostly just want to keep the ball rolling, whittle down the open issue list, and keep the issue list under 25 (a single page in GitHub) open issues at any time. There are plenty of new features in the backlog to do this year, but I’d like to avoid any kind of huge efforts like the 2.0 release last summer.
• BlueMilk — This is definitely inconsistent with reducing my workload, but I’m kinda, sorta well underway with pulling the runtime codegen & compilation “special sauce” out of Jasper and into its own library. Oh, and it’s also meant to be a streamlined replacement for StructureMap. Way more on this one later.
• Storyteller — I actually have a 5.0 alpha published that I’m using personally with some engine improvements and better specification debugging. Depending on time and my ambition level, I’ll either kick that out as is or I might try for a semi-rebuild of the UI to more modern React/Redux usage and possibly try to restyle it from being Bootstrap based to Material UI instead. That’s mostly for the learning experience with client side tooling to keep up with what our development teams face on their projects.
• StructureMap — I’ve been trying for years to get out of supporting StructureMap. I have no intentions of doing any additional work on StructureMap, but I’ll at least try to keep up on user questions and pull requests.
• Oakton — I feel like this is “done,” with the possible exception of supporting async commands
• Alba — The only thing definite is to adapt an outstanding pull request and bump it to 2.0 and only target ASP.Net Core 2.0. Alba didn’t take off like I thought it would and it’s been a struggle to get any of our internal teams to use it much, so it’s probably not going much farther.
• FubuMVC — It’s been “dead” for several years as a public OSS project, but I’ve been supporting it and even enhancing since. My only goal this year with FubuMVC is to make progress within our shop on replacing it with ASP.Net Core MVC on the HTTP side and Jasper on the messaging side.