2011 saw a lot of big events in my life. I got hip surgery early in the year. I found myself thinking of leaving my job of six plus years in the summer. I actually left that job in the fall, and took the big leap into startup land in November. But when I think of 2011, I think the biggest changing influence for me was my entry into the world of open source.
I would call my evolution as a developer a three phase project. First, getting all the fundamentals of computing beaten into me in undergrad and graduate school. Second, learning how to be productive in the working world, the gritty details of actually producing production code and solving problems that sometimes are purely technical but often are a matter of orchestration, attention to detail, and engineering. Finally, combining these two aspects, and putting these talents to use in something that touches developers all over the world.
I fell into the ZooKeeper community by happy chance. I had been given a project to implement a company-wide dynamic discovery service. The developers that had come before me had found ZooKeeper, but had the luxury of implementing a solution that didn't have to scale to the volume and geographic diversity of the whole firm. I had requirements for global scaling and entitlements that didn't seem to be common in the ZooKeeper community at that point, and so I was forced to do more than just comb over the documentation to design my system. I cracked open the source code and got to work learning how it really worked.
My first bug was a simple fix to the way failed authentication was communicated to the Java client library. I had to get approvals almost up to the CTO level to be able to participate, but it was worth the effort. Quickly, I started feeling more responsibility to the community. I was, after all, relying on this piece of software to give me a globally available 24/7 system, and I wanted to be able to support clients where downtime could mean trading losses in the millions. I owed it to my own infrastructure to help fix bugs, and really, it was fun. I love writing distributed systems, and the ZooKeeper code base is a pleasure to work with; a little baroque, but just enough to be a fun challenge, and most of the complexity is in the fundamental problem.
Working in the community has not just been about fixing hard bugs. It's also been about those engineering and teamwork considerations that are beguiling on a co-located team, and working on a team that I communicated with entirely though email and Jira was intense. Lucky for me, the ZooKeeper community is some of the most mature engineers I've ever had the pleasure of working with. We pull together to solve hard bugs, we all participate in answering questions and we try to make everyone feel welcome to participate. I consider the community to be the textbook example of open source done right.
Working with this community, working in public after being sequestered in the tightly controlled environment of finance for so many years, flipped something in my brain. I realized that I wanted to be able to live out loud, as it were. I value openness, the ability to work with people all over the world, the ability to work in public, getting feedback and appreciation from the wider community of developers. It also gave me confidence that I could be productive outside of the comfort zone of the place I had worked for years, and that I could show a degree of leadership even without an official title.
In the end, this experience freed me from feeling tied to the corporate life I had been living. I feel open to choose the path I want as a developer. The startup world of today has embraced this open source mentality, which I think is one of the most exciting developments of the last five years. So, I chose to go to a new job that I knew would let me live out loud.
If you're not already in the open source community, why not crack open your favorite open source project and make 2012 your year of open source?