I got to talk to David Giard on his podcast last week about some of the lessons I’ve learned the hard way across several large OSS projects. For a little background, I got to follow through on a 15 to 20 year dream of mine to found a company called JasperFx Software LLC to build a services and product offerings around the “Critter Stack” family of open source tools (Marten and Wolverine) in the .NET ecosystem. The two main tools are doing well right now, with Marten being the most used Event Sourcing tool for .NET projects and Wolverine gaining traction as an alternative messaging tool and HTTP endpoint framework with its focus on reduced code ceremony and testable code.
The relative success of these tools came after I was the technical leader of a very large, ambitious project called FubuMVC (and FubuTransportation) that fizzled out after I probably sunk 2-3 man years of effort into it over a half decade. As David did helpfully point out, some of the now success of Marten and Wolverine was absolutely predicated on some lessons learned both positive (mostly technical) and negative (community engagement, documentation, samples) from the earlier FubuMVC experience.
Without further ado, here’s David & I:
The Shade Tree Developer 