We've always appreciated Hacktoberfest
and the idea of incentivizing people to contribute to open source. But when we got wind of what Codefresh was doing around "Fixvember" and their focus on the contributions of DevOps, we had to find out more. And so, VMblog reached out to Dan Garfield, Codefresh Chief Technology Evangelist, to learn more.
VMblog: What is
Fixvember?
Dan Garfield: Five years ago, the founders at Hacktoberfest
identified the need, opportunity and positive energy ("Quantity is fun, Quality
is key") to compel a community of coders to improve open source software
through meaningful contributions. Since 2014, Hacktoberfest has had over
400,000 pull requests, and 46,000 challenge completions. This is an impressive
contribution and reflects an important substantive and cultural change for the
open source community. Naturally, as an
open-source tool developer, we were excited by the prospect of all the new
features added from the collective open source software community. But, we also
immediately thought of all the features added that probably didn't come with
tests! It is just a logical extension - whose
time has come - to have a DevOps follow-up in November to fix open source code.
Thus, "Fixvember DevOps Hackathon," a community-based effort to help open
source with DevOps best practices, was born.
VMblog: Why now?
Garfield: Acquisitions are occurring on a large scale,
with Microsoft's purchase of GitHub and IBM's acquisition of Red Hat in 2018
alone. Open source software is finally feeling the love and respect it should
have gleaned from enterprises years ago. It is not by chance that open source
has "arrived" - the open source software community has remained committed to
the principles of shared software and developed a remarkable library of
software that makes it absurd for small and large organizations alike not to
leverage. Code-contributing events such as Hacktoberfest and Fixvember bring
together the community to continue the mission of high-quality code contributed
by and available to all. Fixing bugs may not be as slick as adding features,
but it sure makes using code much easier, and some are happy to take on the
challenge (and get a custom
t-shirt!).
VMblog: Does
Fixvember help software engineers gain better DevOps skills?
Garfield: DevOps has gone mainstream. DevOps engineers
are now among the highest paid engineers in the industry and by nature solid
problem solvers. By highlighting DevOps
through Fixvember, we hope to expose all software engineers to its role and
importance in the engineering process as well as exposing more engineers to
these ideas and best practices. DevOps engineers can bring their expertise to
open source projects and collaborate with engineers at varying skill levels.
For many participants, this will be the first time they get a pipeline setup
and they can add to it as time goes on.
VMblog: What does
this effort do for the software?
Garfield: The beauty of quality DevOps contributions is
that any improvements you make to DevOps processes will pay off indefinitely.
Quality is as important as quantity, but together furthers the mission of open
source by making the software in the cloud accessible, robust and easy to use.
With today's DevOps automation tools, the engineer no longer needs to be a
Master of the Dark Arts to create pipelines. Automation can make the software
engineering process twice as productive, by enabling, for example, the ability
to release twice a day versus once a day, or even once a week. Tools like
Codefresh are built for open source DevOps with support for modern
technologies like Kubernetes, Docker, Helm, and Istio.
It also enables engineers to release with more confidence and reliability with
the potential for cutting open source project times in half.
VMblog: How does it
actually work?
Garfield: Participants are given a few options to earn
the coveted t-shirt in their mission to improve open source software:
- Create Automated Pipelines - Create or improve an automated
pipeline for an open source project.
- Improve Testing - Improve code validation by writing
better tests. Add security, UI, performance, and integration testing to open
source repos.
- Fix Bugs (!) - Bug fixers aren't only for core
maintainers. Find an open source repo and start tackling the bugs they already
know about.
If the participants want to jump
into suggested software, we have teed up a number of opportunities from Helm
Chart repositories to Docker console UI and Dashboards. There will be no lack
of compelling opportunities. If interested, you
can sign up here. It runs until November 30 at midnight PT.
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