search

InnerSourceCommons / InnerSourcePatterns

Proven approaches that can guide you through applying open source best practices within your organization
https://patterns.innersourcecommons.org
Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International
739 stars 181 forks source link

Pattern Idea: Scripts To Rule Them All #180

Open spier opened 4 years ago

spier commented 4 years ago

Pattern idea: Enable contributions in polyglot environments with "Scripts To Rule Them All"

Many companies have a polyglot environment, using multiple different programming languages for the software that they build. The different programming ecosystems come with various ways of bootstrapping the project locally. That means that getting from git clone to an up-and-running project in a development environment works very differently, depending on the programming ecosystem.

Hypothesis

Making it easy to bootstrap a project will encourage contributions from a wider range of contributors, even if they don't know the specific programming language that well.

Examples in the wild

The GitHub team has written about this idea here: https://github.blog/2015-06-30-scripts-to-rule-them-all/ https://github.com/github/scripts-to-rule-them-all

How to write the pattern

One approach for writing this pattern could be to find somebody that works at GitHub and is familiar with the Scripts To Rule Them All approach. Interview them and write a pattern about this approach together with them.

Other references

Also see this discussion in the InnerSource Commons Slack about the "impact of choice of programming language for the success of an InnerSource project": https://innersourcecommons.slack.com/archives/C04PXKRN4/p1589456355371100

(link doesn't work anymore because we cannot go that far back in the Slack history)

loujaybee commented 1 year ago

👋 Just swinging by to mention that this approach is really going a lot more mainstream now, driven by CDEs and especially GitHub's launch of Codespaces and the creation of the Dev Container specification, and some other folks such as devfile who are also working to try and standardise / improve the ability to script an application. I was inspired to come and speak back to the community after seeing @chrisreddington talking about the intersection of this trend, and inner source (yay!). Maybe he'd be a good candidate to "interview" as mentioned here? I would also be happy to provide any insights and research that I've gathered over the years 🙏

Disclaimer: I currently work for Gitpod (however, I was involved with Inner Source Commons before that).

spier commented 1 year ago

Thank you for adding the connection to CDEs here @loujaybee.

This might revive this idea, possibly taking it into a slightly different direction. That's not a bad thing though, as the key for us is is to identify and capture specific InnerSource challenges, that can repeatably be solved by implementing a given pattern. So I am looking forward to check out the talk by Chris that you mentioned, so learn where he sees the intersection between CDE and InnerSource.