My OSS Plans for 2019

I wrote a similar post last year on My OSS Plans for 2018, and it wasn’t too far off what actually happened. I did switch jobs last May, and until recently, that dramatically slowed down my rate of OSS contributions and my ambition level for OSS work. I still enjoy building things, I’m in what’s supposed to be a mostly non-coding role now (but I absolutely still do), and working on OSS projects is just a good way to try to keep my technical skills up. So here we go:

Marten — I’m admittedly not super active with Marten these days as it’s a full fledged community driven project now. There has been a pile up of Linq related issues lately and the issue backlog is getting a bit big, so it really wouldn’t hurt for me to be more active. I happen to love Stephen King’s Dark Tower novels (don’t bother with the movie), but he used to complain that they were hard for him to get into the right head space to write more about Roland and his Ka-tet. That’s basically how I feel about the Linq provider in Marten, but it’s over due for some serious love.

Lamar (was BlueMilk) — Users are reporting some occasional memory usage problems that I think point to issues in Roslyn itself, but in the meantime I’ve got some workarounds in mind to at least alleviate the issue (maybe, hopefully, knock on wood). The one and only big feature idea for this year I have in mind is to finally do the “auto-factory” feature that I hope will knock out a series of user requests for more dynamic behavior.

Alba — I took some time at CodeMash this year and did a pretty substantial 3.0 release that repositioned Alba as a productivity helper on top of TestServer to hopefully eliminate a whole lot of compatibility issues with ASP.Net Core. I don’t know that I have any other plans for Alba this year, but it’s the one tool I work on that I actually get to use at work, so there might be some usability improvements over time.

Storyteller — I’d really love to sink into a pretty big rewrite of the user interface and some incremental — but perfectly backward compatible — improvements to the engine. After a couple years of mostly doing integration work, I suddenly have some UI centric projects ahead of me and I could definitely use some refresher on building web UIs. More on this in a later post.

Jasper — I think I’m finally on track for a 1.0 release in the next couple months, but I’m a little unsure if I want to wait for ASP.Net Core 3.0 or not. After that, it’s mostly going to be trying to build some community around Jasper. Most of my side project time and effort the past three years has been toward Jasper, I have conceptual notes on its architecture that go back at least 5 years, and counting its predecessor project FubuMVC, this has been a 10 year effort for me. Honestly, I think I’m going to finish the push to 1.0 just to feel some sense of completion.

Oakton — I feel like it’s basically done

StructureMap — I answer questions here and there, but otherwise it’s finished/abandoned

FubuMVC — Dead, but little bits and pieces of it live on in Oakton, Alba, and Jasper