My Thoughts on FOSS Crowdfunding

2013-04-07 23:04:24 by jdixon

I was recently cold-emailed about a new service, Catincan, that offers a Kickstarter-like bounty system for open source software projects or features. Someone representing the company reached out to me (and presumably, many others in the open source community) for feedback, generally about the funding of open source development, and specifically about their own service.

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Thoughts from Monitorama 2013

2013-03-30 10:34:42 by jdixon

This is not your typical conference review. This is a braindump of my thoughts following the organization and execution of the 2013 Monitorama Conference and Hackathon in Boston (Cambridge), Massachusetts.

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My Personal Roadmap

2012-08-26 18:21:47 by jdixon

I've been a little busy lately and haven't found the time to post any new articles, Graphite-related or otherwise. For those who missed the announcement, I started working at GitHub in July. Initially I continued my work on Descartes; more recently my time has been split up among a few different projects, both inside and outside of work. Although I generally detest announcing plans before shipping them, I thought others might like to read about what I'm working on these days.

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Trending your GitHub Commits in Graphite

2012-07-22 22:45:55 by jdixon

Today I was browsing the list of service hooks that GitHub provides. I almost forgot that there's a simple WebHook service that POSTs commit information during the git post-receive hook to any external URL. This got me thinking that it would be nice to trend commit activity inside my Graphite server. Don't get me wrong... GitHub already provides some really nice visualization for project and committer activity on their site. However, as a data junkie, I'd love to be able to correlate this activity with my own application metrics.

This was a perfect fit for Backstop, the HTTP/JSON-to-Graphite bridge. After a couple hours of futzing around I had a working version. If you haven't used Backstop before, rest assured that getting started is pretty darn easy. In fact, if you're a Heroku customer, it's easy and free. There are just a few commands to get your own Backstop server running on Heroku.

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The State of Employment

2012-07-08 17:39:48 by jdixon

Seems that it's common for folks to blog about changes in employment. I hate to be left out on the fun, so I'll take a brief moment to officially announce my pending "new-hire" status with GitHub, effective tomorrow.

Friends who've already heard the news pepper their congratulations with a sense of confusion as to why I'd leave a good thing at Heroku. Indeed, I think most people in our industry would rank Heroku and GitHub at the top of their list of prospective employers. Unsurprisingly, I loved my job. I've never worked with a team of engineers as highly skilled or dedicated to their mission as the men and women at Heroku. So why would I leave?

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