Why You Should Be an Open Source Project
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00:00
Video gameOpen sourceQuicksortLevel (video gaming)Group actionSoftware frameworkTheory of relativityTwitterInheritance (object-oriented programming)Revision controlRight angleSoftware developerStudent's t-testEvent horizonProcess (computing)CodeDifferent (Kate Ryan album)SoftwareMultiplication signArithmetic progressionData managementWave packetDisk read-and-write headAreaArithmetic meanCommutatorActive contour modelAbsolute time and spaceSet (mathematics)Staff (military)Power (physics)Line (geometry)Natural numberCellular automatonXMLUML
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Multiplication sign1 (number)Goodness of fitFigurate numberFormal languageFilm editingGame controllerDecision theoryVulnerability (computing)Line (geometry)Software developerSoftware bugOpen sourceBitRevision controlQuicksortPoint (geometry)Shift operatorOnline helpVideo gameFeedbackMereologyEvent horizonAxiom of choiceCross-correlationDivisorSocial classPressureLevel (video gaming)Inheritance (object-oriented programming)MathematicsState of matterSystem callDifferent (Kate Ryan album)CASE <Informatik>Food energyCovering spaceComputer animation
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
Our first speaker will be Karen Wang. She's a community marketing manager at MongoDB. And she will explain why you should be an open source project. Let's applaud Karen. Hi, everybody. Can you hear me OK?
00:30
Can you hear me now? So I'm here to talk to you about why you should be an open source project, or essentially open sourcing your life, yourself, and your self-development.
00:42
So my name is Karen Wang. I work at MongoDB on the community marketing team. Before that, I was working in higher education, organizing student groups. And then actually before that, I was studying psychology. And I was doing some research into self-control, which is how you view yourself in relation to yourself and others.
01:01
So I'm sort of all about the lenses through which we view our lives. And like any self-obsessed millennial, as sort of I got into my 20s and later, I was spending a lot of time thinking about how to be happy and how to reach the next step of my development. And I realized, after working in open source for a little bit, that I could take the framework of an open source project and apply that to my life.
01:22
So when I first announced on Twitter that I was doing this talk, somebody actually asked me why I said open source project instead of an open source person. And I thought about it. And it was really just because it's six of one, half a dozen of another, because people are projects. You're a collection of code.
01:40
So you've got your initial commit from your parents, depending on how much you believe in nature versus nurture. You've got a varying level of this. You've got the pull requests of your childhood influences that your parents either rejected or accepted on your behalf. This is probably coaches. This is teachers. This is your childhood friends. And now you've got you. You're a grown up project. And you've still got people wanting you to change.
02:01
The only difference now is that you're in charge of that instead of your parents. So how do you decide what the next version of you is going to look like? How do you mature? How do you develop? So a common feature of projects is versioning. And you probably heard me say this earlier when I asked, what is the next version of you going to look like?
02:22
And what does this really mean? Well, it means that you're a work in progress. We're all works in progress. There is no end point of being perfect, just like there's never an end point of your software project being perfect. You're not done just because you put out the next version. And sometimes we think that life is going to be perfect
02:40
once we get that dream job, once we move to Paris, once we meet that perfect person. But development, self development, is a lifelong process. Your wants and needs are going to change and evolve just like your friends or your significant others are going to change and evolve. So how do you figure out where to go? Well, you have a road map
03:00
just like in any other project. And here's just an example of a road map that I use. It happens to be what I got from our director of training and development. So it has all the different aspects of your life, or at least my life that I'm trying to think about. And then it sort of roughly has a timeline through which I'd like to try to do things. Next month isn't too soon, but it's not so far away that I'm just going to forget about it.
03:21
And if I look at this right now and I decide to start filling it in, I'm like, all right, maybe I'd like to start running an hour or twice a week. And that's going to be version 277 of me. And then maybe also I'd like to do my taxes because that's due in April. But then maybe I also want to plan an international event. I want to call my mom once a week. I want to visit my friend in DC and I want to get my own apartment.
03:42
Calm down. You can't do all of this at once and you don't want to push all your features at once just because you can't work on everything at the same time. So you create a more realistic road map. I push some things out to slightly different versions. I talk to this about my mom and just like with any other road map,
04:01
you share this with people and you're going to get feedback from them. And having a road map is a good thing just because research has shown that people who have a road map have a happier future down the line even if you don't end up meeting any of these goals. Just having a plan in mind, having a sense of where you're going is actually enormously helpful.
04:21
So say I shared this with some of my friends and I'm like, this is the kind of thing that I want to try to do and you're going to get some feedback. Community feedback is an essential part of any open source project. And so maybe my friend's going to tell me it's really hard for a new runner to try to run an hour twice a week. So why don't, you know, cut that down to 15 minutes four times a week.
04:41
And then maybe I talk to my DC friend and she's like, well, I've really missed you since I've moved away, but I don't know, visiting is essentially the easiest way to do that and I'm really busy. Why don't we just try to talk a little bit more often? And you know, if I tell my mom that I'm going to call her once a week, she already expected that I was going to call her once a week, but I'm going to get a lot more grief now if I don't do it.
05:01
So accountability is also a really good thing for this. But you'll always have these decisions to make on what you can and should manage. This is your internal roadmap. And this is really just to help you allocate your resources. The same thing as it does in any development, this helps you allocate your mental, your physical, and your emotional resources. And so how do you do this?
05:22
Well, another feature of successful open source projects is having a common goal. That's something that you for sure need to have. And a feature of all open source projects, despite them being community-driven as they are, is you need to have a strong leader. You need to have either a person or a body of people
05:40
who are in charge of development. And fortunately for you, this is you in both of these cases. Your goal is to make you happier and you're the person that should be in charge of this. One of the wonderful problems of our world today actually is that you can kind of be whatever you want. Economically, if you're living in a country
06:01
where you have the freedom to do so, you can pretty much become anything. Realistically, you can't be anything. So surprisingly, my Asian parents really wanted me to become a doctor. That's a big surprise, right? And as a child of immigrants who had given up everything to move to a new country, I felt a lot of pressure to do this.
06:20
But I'm not somebody who likes chemistry. I don't like things that I can't see. And I like sleep a lot. I felt a lot more pressure to accept this pull request, this change on my being, on myself, and on my life. But as you can probably guess, I decided not to go to medical school. I declined that pull request on me.
06:40
I was an adult at that point and that was a choice that I wanted to make. The second that you change for somebody else is the second that you've sold out your project and you've lost your goal. So don't sell out. But sometimes people believe that you can be better version of yourself and this is an opportunity to better yourself. So I started taking French in high school.
07:01
In the States, you don't start taking a language until it's far too late to be of any use. And I had a French teacher in college who noticed that I was really good at her course and encouraged me to challenge myself and take some harder classes. You know, I've always kind of liked languages. I thought I was pretty good at them. So I became somebody who I decided was gonna take harder French classes
07:21
and that led to me studying abroad in France and then part of why I'm here today is because I could negotiate with a bakery in Brussels for some cupcakes. P.S. there will be cupcakes in the NoSQL dev room tomorrow. So that's a simple pull request and that was a good one for me to merge on myself. I became somebody who was gonna challenge myself with languages and I became somebody who was going to hopefully be good at it.
07:43
So the main point here is that you're in control. You're in control of whether or not you want to make a decision that's going to change who you are. And simply making that shift in thinking that of understanding that you have mastery over the events of your life overall is one of the most highly correlated factors for happiness. But you'll notice that both of these examples
08:02
required knowing something about myself. Either that I didn't like chemistry, that I love sleep too much, that I didn't like being a workaholic, or that I could probably do pretty well with languages. So how do you figure this out? Well, you need to know your internals.
08:20
This is sort of knowing both your weaknesses and your strengths or your bugs and your features. So personally, micromanagement is something that annoys me a lot. I've snapped at a couple managers because of it, but if you think about that, it's really, I'm a self-starter. I don't need a lot of hand-holding. I don't need a lot of management. You pretty much can tell me what you want to do
08:40
and I'll have my own schedule. I'll have a timetable. I'll tell you what I need. And you can just trust that I'm getting it done. So in my point of view, being a self-starter, being an independent worker, that's a feature. But how do you figure out what these things are? Well, you share your internals. And this part, this is scary because sharing yourself genuinely with other people
09:02
is a very, very scary and a hard thing to do. But people want to help. And fortunately, in the real world, they're generally a little bit nicer than they are in the internet. So when I first started my job at MongoDB, a little while ago, I was scared because I'd gotten to an interesting point in my career development where I couldn't pretend
09:21
to be somebody that I wasn't anymore. Even in my first job, somebody gave me something to do. I'd be like, yeah, sure, that sounds great. That's a wonderful idea. But at this point, I simply could not pretend to give a shit about things that I did not actually give a shit about. And that was scary, but it was also liberating at the same time. And this is a good state to be in.
09:41
This is the same state that you're in when you're with your oldest friends or your close family. And that's when you get into those conversations about what you maybe really like to do but are afraid to, what you're struggling with, what you don't know how to do. So like I mentioned, I work on the community marketing team. Part of what I do is I help engineers put together talk proposals for conferences.
10:01
And my job is fairly mystifying to a lot of my high school friends, none of whom work in tech. And I explain to them that after a couple of months of doing this, of helping them with their proposals, I was feeling kind of like a fraud because I'd never spoken at a conference. I'd never submitted to a conference. I'd never even been on the speaker side of things at all.
10:21
And they asked me, why not? Why haven't you done that? And they had the wonderful perspective that I was too close to see, which is that I could speak at a conference too. That's not just something that I was helping other people do. And so I submitted and here I am. And part of what I'm trying to do here
10:41
is I'm trying to redistribute collaboratively. That's one of the key features of an open source project. You share out your features. You share out your development. You share them back out into the community, even if they're just a variation on something that somebody else has talked about. I mentioned earlier that I decided not to go to med school. I actually ultimately decided not to go to graduate school at all.
11:02
I actually worked in higher education for a while and that completely turned me off of going to graduate school. And I shared my thoughts on this with a lot of my friends. And I was coming from a background of having worked in higher ed. And I recognized that my perspective and my answer is not the holy grail and it's not the one answer for everything.
11:20
But it was helpful to some of them just to understand maybe why I was making that particular decision. And maybe somebody else had really good reasons on why they did go to med school. And their approach isn't wrong. It's just different. Every project develops differently. And you're not trying to compete with other projects. You can draw inspiration. You can draw ideas. You can draw support from them.
11:41
My friend who went to med school, he makes decisions based on how much it helps other people. His sort of MO on life is thinking this decision, this thing that I'm going through, is it going to help somebody else further on down the line? And that maybe is not exactly the way that I think. And maybe is not exactly the way that you think. But I could incorporate that into myself
12:00
and incorporate that into my MO of I want to help engineers speak about things that they're passionate about to people who care and want to hear what they have to say. That's finding a community for them. And community is key for an open source project to flourish. And it's key for us. We know the community makes us both happier and healthier. Having that social support there
12:20
is often one of the most important things in either just recovering from a heart attack or just feeling happy in your life. And people, often when I'm working with engineers on talk proposals, feel like they don't have anything important to say. In the worst case scenario that somebody else has already said something similar, you still have a unique perspective and background that nobody else does.
12:41
That's worth sharing. And somebody else might learn from it. That's why we have conferences. That's why we're all here. So while you could certainly be a closed source project that never changes unless there's profit in it for somebody else, that never lets people see who you are because maybe you're afraid of what they'd find, why would you be?
13:02
Choose open source. You'll be happier. Thank you for your talk. It is your award, the box of chocolate. There's someone with some questions for her.
13:25
More about this, there's a community birds of a feather at three.