When a project leaves the nest: Community driven development and OpenZipkin

Talk I did at Monkigras, which is an interesting meeting in my old neighborhood on community. This particular talk was my perspective of things that led to OpenZipkin and beyond.

Transcript

1. When a project leaves the nest Community driven development and OpenZipkin @adrianfcole
2. @adrianfcole • spring cloud at pivotal • focus on distributed tracing • helped open zipkin
3. zipkin • so.. like Chrome DevTool’s network panel • .. except it is for your whole architecture https://github.com/openzipkin
5. It started with community focus
7. Answers to the problem evolved
9. commit 92c941890c2009a401b777093342dc4f28955640 Author: Johan Oskarsson <johan@oskarsson.nu> Date: Tue Nov 15 10:09:47 2011 -0800 [split] Enable B3 tracing for TFE. Filter out finagle-http headers from incoming requests BigBrotherBird is silently born
10. Zipkin is less silently born commit 2b7acead044e71c744f39804abe564383eb5f846 Author: Johan Oskarsson <johan@oskarsson.nu> Date: Wed Jun 6 11:28:34 2012 -0700 Initial commit
11. And it all seemed to be working!
12. And engineering at Twitter continued
13. And engineering outside Twitter continued
14. Turns out, internal and external communities behave differently
15. zipkin says “we are a community”
16. So what happened? • Zipkin development at Twitter was in short bursts, centered on other work • Many experienced Zipkin engineers don’t work at Twitter (nor live in the Bay Area) • Platform diversity is a reality for many • Having the same goals was our opportunity
17. (open)zipkin left the nest
18. and, I did too.. this deck is that blog.. yeah..
19. we have small whales • Not everyone came back • Some change needed to be reversed • Stabilizing one’s today while progressing another’s tomorrow is a difficult balance
20. yet, the community has never been so strong • Change in zipkin comes from more people across most timezones, for various systems • The zipkin community routinely collaborates with others like OpenTracing • We are learning, but make choices as we go
21. Thank you! cloud.spring.io pivotal.io gitter openzipkin/zipkin @adrianfcole So.. it’s all worth it