May 12, 2013
ApacheConNA: On Security # During the security talk at Apache Con a topic commonly glossed over by
developers was covered in quite some detail: With software being developed that
is being deployed rather widely online (over 50% of all websites are powered
by the Apache webserver) natually security issues are of large concern.
Currently there are eight trustworthy people on the foundation-wide security
response team, subscribed to security@apache.org. The team was started by
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May 11, 2013
ApacheConNA: On documentation # In her talk on documentation on OSS Noirin gave a great wrap up of the topic of
what documentation to create for a project and how to go about that task.
One way to think about documentation is to keep in mind that it fulfills
different tasks: There is conceptual, procedural and task-reference
documentation. When starting to analyse your docs you may first want to debug
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May 10, 2013
ApacheConNA: On delegation # In her talk on delegation Deb Nicholson touched upon a really important topic in
OSS: Your project may live longer than you are willing to support it yourself.
The first important point about delegation is to delegate - and to not wait
until you have to do it. Soon you will realise that mentoring and delegation
actually is a way to multiply your resources.
In order to delegate people to delegate to are needed.
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May 9, 2013
ApacheConNA: First keynote # All three ApacheCon keynotes were focussed around the general theme of open
source communities. The first on given by Theo had very good advise to the
engineer not only striving to work on open source software but become an
excellent software developer:
Be loyal to the problem instead of to the code: You shouldn't be
addicted to any particular programming language or framework and refuse to work
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November 17, 2012
ApacheConEU - part 08 # Jan Lehnardt’s talk covered the history of CouchDB - including lessons learnt along the way. The first issue he went into: Shipping 1.0 is hard! They spent a lot of effort and time in order to have a stable database that won’t loose your data - only to have a poorly patch slip in for 1.0 that resulted in data loss. The fury of action happening afterwards was truely amazing - people working on rolling shifts all over the planet to not only fix the issue but also provide recovery tooling for those affected by the bug.
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