The open-source community was changed forever with the Jenkins software project. Providing hundreds of plugins to be used for project building, deployment, and automation, it is the leading open-source automation server today. To explore this even further, Ben Rometsch goes back to the beginning by sitting down with its creator, Kohsuke Kawaguchi . He tells the story of how he was motivated to design such an open-source project, how it was conceptualized, and the silly origins of its name. The t...
Jun 29, 2021•46 min•Ep. 18
Open source is an ever-evolving field since technological innovation and demands will not stop as human life progresses, finding a useful open-source alternative to existing projects. This way, the work of a developer can be easier depending on the purpose they are after. Ben Rometsch talks with Bjarne Christiansen to discuss the journey of how he built Realm , which offers a mobile database that is not only developer-friendly but also a useful alternative to SQLite and CoreData. He also shares ...
Jun 15, 2021•40 min•Ep. 17
One of the most important features of an open-source project is its high level of user-friendliness. Even if one has various complexities that allow for better application development or webserver management, something that's confusing and time-consuming will not be used as much by many. This is what Kasra Bigdeli had in mind when he started CapRover. He joins Ben Rometsch to share how this simple side hustle grew into an organized company, all to provide the most practical solutions to the bigg...
Jun 01, 2021•40 min•Ep. 16
In this episode, Ben Rometsch helps unravel this category by sitting down with Joseph Jacks of OSS Capital to learn more about what the funding ecosystem looks like for commercial open source companies. JJ is a huge COSS supporter and shares why he thinks this is the best time to be building a company in this space.
May 25, 2021•47 min•Ep. 15
In this episode, Ben Rometsch interviews Ian Tien , the CEO and co-founder of Mattermost , which has been referred to as the open-source alternative for Slack. Ian shares their genesis story in gaming, the challenges they encountered with scaling a messaging company, the applications they find useful, and more.
May 18, 2021•41 min•Ep. 14
Nicolas Hourcard saw this need for a high performance time-series database and decided to co-found QuestDB . In this episode, he joins Ben Rometsch to share the genesis of this project and the problems they are trying to fix with the technology.
May 04, 2021•48 min•Ep. 13
Looking for observability dashboards that have the right balance between looking good, easy to use, powerful, and intuitive? Ben Rometsch has a web application just for you. In this episode, he sits down with the creator and project lead of Grafana , Torkel Ödegaard , to talk about how he started this company that offers a monitoring observability solution built on open-source components. He takes us inside into the work they put into creating a great user interface as well as the behind-the-sce...
Apr 13, 2021•37 min•Ep. 11
Released in 2004, Ruby on Rails is an open-source web application framework written in Ruby. Created by David Heinemeier Hansson , the framework takes full advantage of the Ruby’s unique features to create a language that continues to be very approachable even after almost two decades of development. In this conversation with Ben Rometsch, David dives deep into the genesis and evolution of Ruby on Rails and talks about his other works in progress at Basecamp and HEY . He also shares his propheti...
Mar 30, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 10
Universal code search is an awesome tool that can make you a lot more efficient as a coder, but not many developers or companies use it. An open source alternative to Google Code Search, Sourcegraph is on a mission to bring this underappreciated piece of software into every developer and every company that needs it. The company’s CEO, Quinn Slack joins Ben Rometsch on the show to share how Sourcegraph works with former Google developers to replicate some of the amazing features of Google’s inter...
Mar 16, 2021•42 min•Ep. 9
Companies that have an open source component usually started out as open source and then developed an enterprise version of the software later. Load testing SaaS platform, k6 approached its development the other way around – producing an interesting dynamic that has resulted to unique outcomes for the company. As CEO Robin Gustafsson relates in this conversation with Ben Rometsch, that entry into the relatively unknown territory of open source gave the k6 team a lot to argue about for some years...
Mar 02, 2021•43 min•Ep. 8
There is an ethical conundrum that revolves around the issue of data privacy when it comes to web analytics. Most marketers and businesses, especially the smaller ones, are naturally inclined to use Google Analytics because it offers high functionality for free. However, it does come with the price of data privacy and governments and other stakeholders are increasingly becoming aware of it. Maciej Zawadziński was among the people at the forefront of the development of Piwik (now Matomo), an open...
Feb 15, 2021•50 min•Ep. 7
Co-Founder and CTO of Sentry, David Cramer joins Ben Rometsch on this episode to talk about his journey from a side project of 70 lines of open source code to the most widely adopted open source crash reporting platform in the world.
Feb 02, 2021•52 min•Ep. 6
Legal systems for almost any industry tends to follow innovation. In open source, that lag has been even more pronounced due to the pace of change and increased complexity. OSS Capital founder, Heather Meeker , has followed the evolution of open source licensing over the course of her 25 year legal career. Sitting down with host Ben Rometsch in this episode, she describes how the legal community is coping with the ever increasing complexities and shares her opinion on the role of legal going for...
Jan 19, 2021•49 min•Ep. 5
Transitioning from a closed source project to open source has its own challenges. Shedding light into the process, Ben Rometsch invites Tom Moor , the founder of Outline . Outline is becoming a widely adopted knowledge-base for leading companies around the world. It has grown incredibly fast with over 10,000 stars on Github and poised to continue it's growth with recent major products in this space being sunset. Together, they talk about Tom’s journey into starting his company as a side project,...
Dec 29, 2020•39 min•Ep. 4
Ansible was created to make automating IT infrastructure simple. In this episode, we are joined by Michael DeHaan , founder of Ansible, to take us through a wide-ranging conversation. He talks about his beginnings in the open-source community at Redhat, why he started Ansible as a side project and his thoughts on the open-source community's state. Technologies Discussed: Ansible, Redhat, VMWare, IBM, Virtualization, DNS Management, Up To Date, Chef, Puppet, Configuration Tools, Open Source, SSH,...
Dec 14, 2020•57 min•Ep. 3
Uku and Marko are the Co-Founders of Plausible...and they've never actually met in person. Plausible is an open source alternative to Google Analytics and a project that was launched in 2018. Uku was inspired to launch a project on IndieHackers and share his progress with the world. Eventually he decided to open the product up to the open source community. About 6 months ago, Uku and Marko decided to team up as co-founders, but due to the pandemic they haven't met face-to-face. Since launching t...
Dec 13, 2020•44 min•Ep. 2
In this episode, Paul Dix talks about the origins of InfluxDB, how they’ve built it into a massive project and where they are heading next. Paul shares great insights on how they found early product-market fit, decided to build a database as a product and why they saw a unique opportunity for their technology with the open source community. Technologies discussed: Redis, MongoDB, Rust, Influx Database, Flagsmith, DataDog, Apache, Database, JavaScript, API, Open Source, SQL, MySQL...
Dec 11, 2020•47 min•Ep. 1
