At Yola, using and creating free and open source software has been part of our engineering DNA since we started on this crazy adventure 7 years (to the month!) ago.
The importance (and reliance) that we place on open source software is evident in one of our technology architecture goals:
Open Source solutions are preferable to proprietary ones
Unsurprisingly, many, if not all of our engineers (note to self: conduct an open source witch-hunt later) are opensource software contributors. Large and essential pieces of our technology stacks (personal and for profit) rely on many of the major F/OSS software projects (Apache, MySQL, PHP, Python, Java, GNU/Linux, Memcached).
This is our first attempt to consciously sling some love back into the community of generous people that have made our lifestyles possible.
Also, so that the giants our children stand on, will already have their shoulders poking into the technological stratosphere. (#technologicalsingularity)
I volunteered (jk, Stacey made me...) to break the ice, lead the charge and mix the metaphors (and drinks), because I have some level of competence in the perpetuation of cliches and the construction of meta-mountains from molehills.
Consider me the unpaid opening act for the imminent prose and code performances of the rest of our talented and well-groomed engineering team.
As my reward, I get to show off some of the projects that we're proudest of:
- demands is a exceptionally demanding HTTP client framework built on requests
- authtkt is an implementation of mod_auth_tkt cookies
- property-caching is a property cache implementation.
- hashcache is a wrapper for the django cache API, to gracefully handle long or non-ascii keys.
- yoconfigurator handles build configuration for deployable apps.
You can find the rest of our public projects here. Please try them out, use them and help us improve them.
We also maintain some interesting personal projects:
- @thomasw: testtube; querylist; djproxy
- @michaeljoseph: changes; righteous; remarkable
- @blaix: license-generator; crowd-rest; jme3-jruby-template; ruby_gpg
Don't be strangers.
cool
This is awesome! Thanks so much for sharing. I'm a huge advocate for getting everyone's voice heard and showing off the personality of our team here at Yola.
As we are building up this portfolio, we could create a separate category on the Yola blog for these posts (such as Engineering at Yola). I think users may also be interested, and it would help flesh out our content to attract different types of people.
If you and Lisa are ok with this, we can have this published next week. I only have a few, very minor edits.