GitHub CodeConf 2015, 23 May 2017

Previous Meeting

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From YouTube: Microsoft’s Voyage into Open Source, Kasey Uhlenhuth - CodeConf 2015

Description

Microsoft’s involvement with open source has received a lot of attention recently with announcements around .NET and C#. In this presentation, Kasey Uhlenhuth will walk you through Microsoft’s journey into open source and explain how .NET -- Microsoft’s popular developer platform -- is leading the open source effort at the company. She will also cover how development teams are adjusting to working in a new way and how the community has become an integral part of the .NET open ecosystem.

About CodeConf
CodeConf improves the software community by providing a forum for thought-provoking talks and forging social connections. The third installment of the CodeConf series took place in Nashville in 2015. Attendees came together to discuss open source, best practices, documentation, and community.

For more information on this year's CodeConf, go to:
https://codeconf.com/

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Please welcome Casey.

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Good all right, how do you all how you doing today yeah? Do we have any people from Louisville in the house represent? Go cards? Sorry I know they're UK fans which is like not allowed, but we'll roll with it this time. So we only got 20 minutes to speed through this, so I want you all to hold on to your seats and hats, because we are going for a ride. So traditionally, Microsoft has had release cycles like a rocket trying to land on Jupiter.

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We spend we spent time and years in space before we make our big landing, but the modern Microsoft is now set to navigate the agile and changing world of open-source, and we want to do this well specifically, in order to do this. Well, we think we need to manage the three tensions of open product development.

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These tensions are maintaining product direction, reconciling salaried and passionate contributors and adapting to distributed teams, so I'm Casey, one who I'm program manager on the.net team at Microsoft and today I'm going to first talk about how net sell on our open source voyage today and where we are I'm, then going to talk about our approaches to navigating the three tensions I just mentioned, and, lastly, we're going to take a look at how well our efforts have gone so far, going open source and how we need to improve going forward.

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So Microsoft's, open source journey actually started about 10 years ago, when we open sourced Wix on SourceForge, which may be a blast to the past. For some of you since then, we have been involved in open source in several ways. You can see a couple of the projects we've worked on here.

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The main ways that we contribute to open source, though, are yeah by contributing to a contribute code open-source which, for example, we have a lot of the open-source we've done with net or typescript. We integrate with open-source projects like docker or Cordova, and we interrupt with open source tools and platforms like github or web frameworks.

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Today, the dotnet team is primarily leading the way with the modern Microsoft's move into open source. You may have seen a lot of news around this around the November timeframe, and one thing that Microsoft has helped start is the dotnet foundation, which is similar to the Patchi Foundation at main purpose is to foster open development around the dotnet ecosystem. We also help remove operational legal overhead from developers who just want to open-source their projects, and we kind of have established a community for them already there's about 35 last time.

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I checked projects that are part of the.net foundation right now and about 13 of them are external to Microsoft.

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So one of these teams, as part of the.net foundation, is Rosslyn, which is the code name for the c-sharp and VB compiler project. It's are about five years ago and when it started, it was to completely react, attacked the c-sharp and VB compiler, because we wanted to provide an API surface for developers to build code, focused tools, and so when we were designing this five years ago, we knew we want to go fully open source from the beginning, because it just made sense.

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If you want to build smart tools, you should know exactly how the compiler works. However, five years ago we were working on this, it didn't make sense to go fully open source at the time it was going to be more of a piece by piece process for us. So how did we eventually do this? Well, a year and a half ago, we made our source code available to the public, so you could read it, you could see it. You couldn't do anything else, but it was our first step.

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Then we open up our language design notes which, at the time, year and half ago, we are working on c-sharp, six and VB 14 and the community feedback we got on. These notes was critical in determining what we kept or cut for c-sharp 6 + BB 14. At this point, we had our feet under enough unrest enough with open source that we were able to start accepting community pull requests.

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So what I mean up here? It says source open what I mean by that. Is that still doing a lot of work internally, so code reviews, whilst we're still done internally bug tracking still done internally and we were still doing direct commits to the repo and along this journey so far, we had decided to take a learning in the open approach as what we like to call it where the community was helping us make course corrections along the way to help us on our journey.

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So one thing that the community really steered us towards was moving to where the community already was, which was on github. So early this year in January, we moved to github thanks to Jarrod Parsons, my colleague, who is sitting down here. You should come talk to us later. If you have questions- and so we moved to where the community was on github, once moving to github, we were able to completely adopt the community workflow. So we submitted pull request to make code changes the same as anyone else would all of our code.

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Reviews were done in the public and all of our issue and bug tracking is done through github now, and the last thing now is: the community is steering us towards improving our documentation. We, so what we're actually working right now is how do we do collaboration on Docs in the open?

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So if you have ideas, come find me or Jared, because we'd love to talk to you, because the wiki model isn't really working for us right now, so the biggest change for us was actually this move from open source or source open with limited contributions to fully open source. So this is like a snapshot of how our community interactions have changed from with this model move.

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So we have now 10 times the number of community accepted PRS per month we have 5 times the number of community filed issues per month and five times the number of Forks per month, just by moving to working, mostly in the open. Instead of behind closed doors, which is huge, I mean this is a huge change and the amount of community interaction we've seen and now for more, like take step back and see how we're doing compared like our Co contributor growth over time.

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So this is comparing us to joints nodejs and zamarons mono project and is showing how the dotnet core library, the dotnet runtime of dalek compilers, which is Roselyn, and the visual f-sharp team, are doing with our code growth, our code contributor growth over time. So you can see that Roslyn, the runtime and the core libraries are actually. The community is growing a lot around code contributors and it's normalized, so that time is zero if you're having trouble reading this graph. So this is what node looked like nine months from their inception.

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So this is a huge volume of community we're generating and a huge amount of interaction which leads us to our three tensions of open product development. So how do we do open product development without being randomized by all the community interactions? Coming in, for example, looking at the first c-sharp, seven design notes of the year shows that we generated almost 250 comments on the thread and over a hundred different participants, which is a huge amount of interactions. Oh and they're all high quality.

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So we have to sift through all these and how do we stay productive with this large volume of incoming feedback? So one thing we do to try to help channel this. Is we posted a public road map, and so this, like nose, outlines our goals and the features we're thinking of doing to funnel this interaction. But it really only helps with incoming pull requests and feature requests. It still isn't really helping with language design, which is a problem that we're currently trying to solve.

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So any of you all have worked on other open-source languages and have ideas. Please come talk to me or Jared. We would love to talk to you we're currently looking at what Russ does, which is pretty different from what we're doing so, if you have ever contributed to rust, come find this tell us how you like it so. The second tension is reconciling salaried contributors and passionate contributors, and what I mean by this is while people intern Microsoft are probably also passionate about our projects.

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The root motivation may be different, so the core part of this tension is that Microsoft is a large company and people move around all the time. People get promoted. People move teams, people leave the company. So how do you keep the interaction in a community stable and healthy when there's a part of it? That's always moving around and so from investigating this.

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We realized that this huge move to open source is just as much as it is about big companies learning how to work with open source, as it is about the open source community learning how to work with big companies like us, so one awesome, passionate contributor example is Jeff Norton, also known as kangaroo within four days of the core CLR going open source. He got it completely ported to Mac OSX.

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He told us he didn't sleep for those four days which is kind of scary, but also totally awesome, and this is someone that we want to keep active within the project, but he's already created core relationships with people that are internal to Microsoft and if they get promoted and move on, how do we keep people like Jeff around and contributing the last last?

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One is: how do we adapt distributed teams, so we have people from all over the community contributing to our project and all over the world, so how, when everyone's working different time zone, how are we keeping the energy high around our project? I mean people are asleep when we're working or asleep, when they're working? How do we figure this out and it seems like a lot of actually open source projects? Do have this problem, so I would love to hear how you all are doing it.

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So one thing that the visual f-sharp team does is: they have monthly online meetups over Skype and they do these at 9:00 a.m. Pacific time, which you know, helps everyone and the Americas and like Western, Europe and maybe parts of Asia, but then there's like whole time zones of people that are completely cut out from these online meetups. So how do we keep everyone involved when we all live in different places?

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So again, these three tensions are: how do we maintain product direction without getting randomized by all the feedback we're getting? How do we reconcile salaried and passionate contributors, so this is just as much about us learning how to work the community as the community Larry how to work with us and then how do we adapt to distributed teams when everyone's working in a different time zone, so I think so far, we've been doing a pretty good job of managing these and we still have a lot of work to do.

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But so far it's been going pretty well and I. Think the thing that we've actually done super well on the.net team is actually fostering community. So we pretty much follow three principles that have really helped us with.

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You know getting people involved in our project and keeping things healthy, and so the first thing is before dotnet went opens had the big open source announcement in November, we have a lot of people internally, who were already part of the open source community, so they like put together this email, that kind of had all their advice for how you should interact with the open source community and how you should do it, and the premise of it was don't be a jerk which is pretty obvious, but you know we all know the internet changes people, so it you know.

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Sometimes you just need to clarify it. So I actually also included some snippets from that internal email to satiate. Your curiosity, so this is just saying, like you know, everyone deserves respect on day, one. You should be a role model and that you should provide people with actionable feedback there pretty self-explanatory, but it's good to help set the stage for how we wanted to do open source right and that we're committed to doing this.

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The next thing that we did pretty well was realized that we're all a team, no matter where you live, no matter where you work, no matter who you are we're all working towards a common goal on the same project, and we all want us to succeed, which also means you have to be responsive.

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So the Roslyn team, before we move fully open source, the Community Action was telling us that we weren't being responsive enough in the open, which was probably because we were doing a lot of work internally, and so, when we actually moved to fully open source, we measured how well we were doing with being responsive using the Arctica API. And so we actually learned that.

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Now we respond to 75% of pull requests within the first hour of them being published, and we close almost 80% of pull requests within the first three days of them being published, which is pretty incredible honestly, with how international our community is and so be interesting to see as time goes on and the community grows. How well we're able to maintain this interaction, and the last and probably most important thing that we did was have fun. It's super important to have fun the open-source community is, you know full of tons of quirky fun.

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Awesome people and you know believe it or not. Microsoft is also like that, and so we want to share our culture with everyone. So one thing that the Rosslyn team did to celebrate people who are our first code contributors was: we sent them cups of tea, which is a language joke and on the back we engraved their siya one of their first commits and their user name, and we mailed it to anyone that was one of those first people to dip their toe into our project and people love this.

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You can see them all on Twitter. If you check out my Twitter handle I retweet, all of them and they're just a fun thing. We did to really invigorate the culture around and like share what we're like with all the community and the point that I want to end on. Is that we're still learning you know a couple weeks ago, we made this logo up here the Roslyn one, because what open-source project does not have a logo and does not have a sticker come on guys, so we started what we needed one.

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So we sent it out and totally be like hey look at this design. We came up with and there was actually a ton of pushback on it, which I found surprising, but then, when I took a step back and realized, what we're doing Microsoft is huge. The thing that seemed to resonate whoa, not hiring people before is that we have over a hundred buildings on main campus filled with people who work at Microsoft.

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We are huge and now we're making this huge change to moving to open product development and it's not just affecting engineers and their workflow. It's affecting everyone at the comedy company like marketing, HR management. The legal department like this move is touching everyone in the company and it's a huge culture shift for all of us and we're trying to do it well.

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So to celebrate our success to moving towards this can't turn my head I brought some awesome stickers that we now have especially Rozell one to show that we are moving forward and that we're making progress in this open-source space and we're super excited, and while we still have fun to learn, we are thrilled with where we've been going so far, and we can't wait to see what comes next.

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If you have questions come, find me and Jared we'd love to talk to you.

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Thank You KC all right.

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