“It’s the duty of all Free Software developers to steal as much time as they can from their employers for software freedom.”
Jeremy Allison, co-creator of Samba and, at the time, a Google employee.
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Thoughts
Short thoughts that are cross-posted to X (Twitter), Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn and Threads.
Open source maintainers at profitable companies: stop asking permission to fix what your employer already depends on.
No paperwork. No programme. No manager’s blessing. Just maintain it on the clock.
ossresistance.com
Open Source Resistance
A direct-action manifesto for maintainers keeping open source alive on company time.
Your regular reminder that shitting on OSS on social media is a selfish thing to do.
Good job sapping volunteer maintainers’ motivation in exchange for your “internet points”.
Next time: try rolling up your sleeves and contribute a fix to the problem you’ve identified.
I wonder how much of people loving or hating meetings is down to how well they can type or multitask.
“I’m excited to work with you, the company seems great. I’m a little unwhelmed with the salary, though, is there any chance you can do better?”
This sentence gets most who try a 0-10% new job pay increase with zero resentments.
Paraphrase it and use it (even on me).
This was a good read and reflects my experiences. It also made me think the answer to “what do we do with juniors/students and AI” is “actually teach them software engineering best practices, not just CS fundamentals”.
christophermeiklejohn.com
Software Engineering Is Becoming Civil Engineering
Software engineering is undergoing a transformation similar to when structural design separated from craft construction to become civil engineering, with AI handling feature development while platform engineers focus on building safe, resilient systems.
At work, you have two jobs: being good at your job, being pleasant to work with.
You can sometimes get by for a while not doing them both but it’s hard to survive doing neither.
Every time you open an issue or pull request with “No description provided”, an open source maintainer dies.
One of the strengths of Homebrew, despite it being unpopular, is being willing to break backwards compatibility when necessary.
NPM’s unwillingness to do so reflects GitHub’s: both show excessive caution that harm both security and usability.
https://nesbitt.io/2026/03/31/npms-defaults-are-bad.html
nesbitt.io
npm's Defaults Are Bad
The npm client's default settings are a root cause of JavaScript's recurring supply chain security problems.
My talk “Ruby on Guard (Rails)” from Haggis Ruby 2024 is now on YouTube.
Weird watching in hindsight when I was very much pre-AI.
If anything, AI only makes the guardrails more important and valuable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgjFrEtMadQ
www.youtube.com
Ruby on Guard (Rails)
Ruby is powerful, and you want to move fast. So having guardrails can be useful?