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Open source (house of innovation)

Open source (house of innovation)

Freek Van der Herten

October 19, 2018
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  1. The story behind 

    our open source efforts

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  2. About me
    Freek Van der Herten
    Partner & developer at SPATIE
    @freekmurze
    https://murze.be

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  3. Since 2003
    Websites, applications and webshops
    Team
    9 awesome human beings
    Specialization
    Laravel / Vue development

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  4. Open Source 

    Software

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  5. We use a lot of it
    Nginx, Laravel, Ubuntu, Vue, Yarn, Redis, Beanstalkd, MySQL,
    Composer, Glide, Homestead, Flysystem, Fractal, Carbon, PHPUnit,
    NPM, React, jQuery, Java, SSH, Sequel Pro, BackupPC …

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  6. We create a lot of it
    ± 200 packages on Packagist
    ± 20 000 000 downloads total, ±1 800 000 downloads a month
    Most popular ones: laravel-backup, laravel-medialibrary, 

    laravel-permission
    Newest ones: laravel-view-models, laravel-blade-x
    Postcardware

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  7. Package

    development

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  8. The setting
    Zend Framework 1
    PHP world was pretty stale around 2012
    Laravel 4: developer happiness, clear syntax
    Laracasts: miniseries on package development + Travis

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  9. The first package
    Browsershot: take screenshots of website programmatorically
    PhantomJS
    Working in the open
    People started blogging about it

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  10. Beyond the first package
    Blender: conversion from Zend Framework to Laravel
    A lot of functionalities that could be helpful to other developers
    New packages: laravel-newsletter, laravel-medialib, laravel-
    analytics
    Opensourcing Blender itself
    Very positive feedback from the community

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  11. Creating a habit
    Every package gets born inside a client project
    Almost every client project results in a package:

    laravel-sitemap, opening-hours, …
    Teamwork
    Creating Blade X was a fun experience

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  12. Impact

    on many levels

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  13. Making time
    Time consuming
    Coding, writing tests, writing docs, getting the word out
    Maintenance, responding to issues, reviewing PRs
    6000 issues, 5000 PRs

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  14. Planning
    Only plan 4 days a week for client work
    Extra day for support, learning and opensource efforts
    Free time

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  15. Benefits of creating packages
    A lot of learning by coding up the package and writing tests
    Feedback from the community
    Free code!
    Dogfooding
    Getting our name out there

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  16. Getting exposure
    Speaking at conferences
    Company name becomes a seal of quality
    More interesting projects
    International clients
    Hiring very talented people

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  17. Starting side projects
    https://ohdear.app
    Immediate audience
    Making friends
    Starting a conference (https://fullstackeurope.com)

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  18. Beware of burn out
    Easy to work too much on open source in free time
    Felt some of early staging
    Starting doing less
    https://murze.be/doing-less

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  19. Future plans

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  20. No fixed roadmap
    Depends on the client projects
    Nova tools
    Saas projects

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  21. In closing

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  22. Working on packages has a lot of benefits
    It’s fun
    Social aspect
    Can be recommended to everyone

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  23. https://spatie.be/open-source

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  24. Thank you!
    https://speakerdeck.com/freekmurze/open-source-house-of-innovation
    https://spatie.be/open-source
    https://murze.be
    https://ohdear.app
    https://fullstackeurope.com

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