Andy Lester

Hi, I’m Mike. I’m with Utastic here at Chicago Web Conf. I’m sitting down with Andy Lester. You might have used some of his tools, www.mechanize or Ack. He’s also formerly ran the Chicago Pearlmongers out in the suburbs. He’s written quite a bit about job hunting and how to be a good citizen inside of the open source community. Thank you for sitting down with me, Andy. Can you tell me a little bit about what your experience has been working with Ack and Mechanize and all the other tools that you’ve created and put out there? Sure. Most of what I do is, like a lot of open source projects, is scratching an itch. Something like Ack scratched the itch of me needing to search through a code base that was multiple different languages together and I needed an easy way to filter out certain languages. I scratched that itch and it grew from there. www.mechanize, the Pearl module, started from we needed a way to do automated testing of web pages, make sure that logins worked and didn’t work in the proper way. Found an existing module, forked that off, and grew that. But what’s great about that model is once you start the original itch, and once you talk about it, and once you start talking about, “Hey, here’s something that I’ve done,” and a lot of people, I don’t think, talk about that. They don’t talk about their projects enough. When other people start to use it, the role of me as a maintainer has, in most of my projects, has gone from the original creator to shepherd of the ongoing maintenance. So something like Ack, people add features, or Mechanize, I’ve probably written maybe a third of Mechanize, and the other two-thirds are all things that have come from the community. So it’s more of the vision. You’ve become more of a product manager at a certain point. At some point, yeah, I do, and part of that also comes to where you need to hand that off to other people. So for instance, Mechanize, I’ve handed off because I’ve not been able to do the maintenance on it that I need to do, put the time into it, and there are other people who have those, have the skill, have the time, and so now, that’s going to be part of the core Pearl LWP, core module. What else is actually going to be part of Pearl itself? Well, not of Pearl, but of the LWP, which is pretty common on most of the institutions. Okay. Is that like your standard lib? Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, it’s one of the standard libraries. And so, that kind of ongoing maintenance, you can pass off, I said, “Hey, you know what, I’m not able to put all the time into it.” Also there were issues that I was not qualified to deal with. I’m horrible at internationalization. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand the issues that go into dealing with all the different kinds of character sets. And so, when I handed that off to Jesse Vincent, who does a lot of work across multiple character sets, I mean, he does a lot of stuff with Asian languages, I know, I said, “Okay, he’s going to know how to deal with this.” I handed it off to him. So, it is like project management, or product management. It’s, and I try not to be, you know, in some extent, I have to be the benevolent dictator, but I also have to bring people in. I have to encourage other people to contribute. So, it’s not just about product, it’s about encouraging, fostering a sense of, that you’re bringing something to the table, even if it’s, I know you were trying to get somebody to generate an ASCII art for, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For the Cathy, for the ACK. Right, right. Because in America, the character Cathy says, “ACK!” And she wants chocolate. Right, and it’s just a silly thing. Yeah. It’s just a silly thing, but there’s so many ways that we can contribute. One of the things that I try to talk about, whenever I can, is that there’s so many ways we contribute to open source. I wrote an article called, “14 Ways to Contribute to Open Source Without Being a Rockstar.” You can go Google it, you’ll find it. And the point is that you don’t have to be one of these huge brains. You don’t have to be a DHH, or a Larry Wall, or one of these guys who just has fantastic vision and coding chops, because I’m not that guy. Right. I just, but I try to contribute where I can. And everybody has a way that they can contribute, whether that’s fixing a bug, whether that’s just verifying a bug in the code. In the bug tracker. Or saying, “Well, you know what, this happens on my machine, and it’s different on this other machine.” Just little things like that can make a world of difference when it comes to development. And so, one of the things I try to talk about is how you don’t have to be this, a rock star. Everybody can contribute in some way. You don’t have to devote hours and hours and hours every week, but just every little bit that you can do helps. And I try to think, I talk about how open source is kind of a quilt, and some people add big squares to the quilt, and some people add little squares to the quilt, but everything is just little stitches. And every little stitch that you can add helps the entire community, the entire project, helps the understanding of open source, and why open source is so important to what we do in computing. Yeah. And it also goes beyond just… Code contributions, you know, you do the Bobby Tables and the Perl, but… Right. BobbyTables.com is a great example, because I read Stack Overflow all the time, StackOverflow.com, it’s a question and answer question, and so many questions, so many questions were people coming and saying, “Well, how do I get around SQL injection?” And of course, Bobby Tables is a reference to an XKCD cartoon. Yeah. About SQL injection. And people understood that, but they didn’t really have… A lot of these newbies were coming in and didn’t understand all the issues. And I found myself getting so tired of saying the same thing over and over again that I just set up a website. And what I did, though, is I just scraped all the answers from everywhere on Stack Overflow, and I just took the best answers of everything and just put it on the website. Yeah. So then I can just make it super simple to make the barriers to helping somebody so low and just say, “Go to BobbyTables.com and there’s the answer for you.” Yeah. And I think the important differentiation of what you did and some of the other scrapers is they’re mostly trying to do click-throughs. You’re just trying to catalog and make these common answers more accessible. Yeah. And is this something that somebody could just go and contribute directly an answer to? Well, that’s the other beautiful thing, is that the source code for Bobby Tables is on GitHub. Okay. So anybody can go and fork the code on GitHub, make a patch, and send me a pull request. The beautiful thing about that is that now there’s a German translation of BobbyTables.com. So more internationalization. More… Right. Which I have no idea. Yeah. I don’t know German, but there’s now a German translation. There’s a Russian translation. And it’s all hosted on Bobby Tables. So the guy who came along and said, “I’d like to do the German translation,” set up the code for me and did a lot of the translation. But now I have this framework. Right. So when the guy came along who wanted to do the Russian translation, just added a language to it, and now he’s able to contribute. That’s one of the beautiful things that GitHub has done, is that they’ve made the barriers so low, it’s so easy to fork things. To make comments on issues in the issues database, where it’s so simple to do contributions. Yeah. And that’s the converse to what Linus was saying about his frustrations with Linux, is they have very high… In order to contribute to Linux, it’s an extremely high threshold to be able to contribute to the core. Right. So for most projects, you just need help. Right. You just need somebody to help. You just need a little bit of stuff. Yeah. Right. And that applies everywhere. That applies whether it’s running a user group meeting. You come in and you make coffee. Right. And anybody can do that. And it’s simple. Or you clean up afterwards so that your sponsors don’t find a mess that… Right. It sounds so small, but it’s not. Every one of those is a little stitch in the quilt. Yeah. I cannot say how much I appreciated at SCMC, a Software craftsmanship in McHenry County. I don’t often plug my own group. McHenry County represent. Yeah. Yeah. The MC. But turning around and seeing that the people who came had already cleaned up all their own stuff. Sure. I don’t have to run around chasing it. And so I can talk to people and make newbies to the group feel more comfortable and welcome. So it’s all part of an ecosystem. Yeah. When you pick up your own plates, I can talk to somebody who’s there for the first time and make them feel more comfortable so that way they’ll come and then we get bigger and bigger. It has to be. It has to be ongoing because so much of what we do is we think of, we sit here and we’re in awe of these great technical brains that do amazing things. And yet there’s so much other things that need to get done and they’re not any worse. It’s not like they, you know, they might not have the glamor, but they’re still just as important. So on the Parrot project, for instance, Parrot is the virtual machine that is underpinning Rakuto Pearl, which is the main implementation of Pearl six. So there’s an entire virtual machine, uh, that there’s some incredible brain power going into creating a virtual machine and that’s way beyond my pay grade. I don’t know. I, I, that’s way beyond me. I don’t understand, you know, sitting here comparing garbage collection algorithms. That’s not, that’s not, that’s not my thing. Right. Right. But I can do, but what we do have is what’s called the Parrot cage cleaners and the Parrot cage cleaners are the, are the guys who go and, uh, they might look at a test, part of the test so we can go, Oh, this is, this is redundant to this other test here. We’ll go and remove it or we’ll find, uh, some code that for some reason is intended incorrectly or comment that’s out of date or we’ll go look in the book in the, uh, the, uh, ticket queue and go clean stuff up. Jim Keenan out in New York is amazing that the number of, uh, some days they’ll just be a dozen closed tickets where Jim has gone through and said, Oh, this is fixed. This is fixed. This is fixed. Six months ago and help clean those up. All that kind of scut work is absolutely crucial to a successful project. The people who are building the core not have to have a mess, not have to, so that way they can produce the thing which feeds back to the people who are using it. Right. So when you’re using it, you pay for it by helping do some scuttle work and then it feeds back and comes a cycle. Absolutely. Absolutely. Everything that we do, anything that you do that helps an open source project is, is valuable. Even just talking about it. You sit here and you write a blog post about, Hey, look, I found this project. You know, I, I, I found, you know, this food project that I, that saved me an hour on something that I was doing, save, spend 10, 15 minutes writing that in your blog and, or tweeting about it or posting it to Facebook or whatever it may be. And tell people about it because otherwise people don’t know about it. Right. And you know, one of the, one of the things, it’s funny because I have people come up to me at conferences sometime and they kind of go, I, I, you know, I’ll say, well, tell me about what you do. And they go, well, you know, I’m not, I’m not as famous as you. And I say, the only reason I’m famous is because I have a big mouth. Right. And I talk about these things. I’m not any smarter than you are. I’m not any better programmer than you are. I just talk a lot. Yeah. And, and hey, here we are now. Yeah. So that kind, we, one of the things that, that geeks tend to not do is they don’t like to talk about themselves. They don’t like to brag. Yeah. They don’t like to, and, and that’s not just a geek thing. People in general don’t like to, and that’s one of the problems, of course, that, that they have when it comes to job interviews because they don’t like to talk about what they’ve done. They don’t like to brag. But part of this is we need to brag. Not that we’re bragging about how cool we are that we did this, but that this is useful. So something like ACK, I talk about ACK not because I want people to somehow, you know, adulate me, but that I want people to use it because I think it’s helpful. I want people to find useful things. So and now, you know, so ACK, ACK has a website called, the ACK website. The ACK website is called BetterThanGREP.com because I wanted people to have other things that are better than GREP for searching source code, and there’s actually a page on there where I talk about other kinds of tools that are there. Yeah. And now, so now, somebody has come along with a website called BetterThanACK.com, building on top of that, and I couldn’t be more delighted. I love that we build off of each other, that, and, you know, it’s not competition. It’s not, it’s not like, you know, people are… You’re going to take away my, my, my earnings. Right. By taking some… Right. That’s, that’s one of the tricks with paid software is, is, you know, collaboration isn’t, is desired for the competitor because they’re going to be taking away your, your profit. Right. Whereas when it’s open source, it’s just, hey, you just made something better. Right. Hey, now I can use it. Now my life is better. It’s the difference between a scarcity mentality and an abundance mentality. Scarcity mentality thinks that everything’s in balance. Everything’s a zero sum game. Whether it’s adulation, or love, or time, or everything is just zero sum. And an abundance mentality says that the more people that come in, the more we have. The more we have to give. And so that’s why I want to bring in as many people as I can to work on open source. To use, even if you just use it, that’s great because that helps all of us. So that, that’s, that’s my philosophy behind it. Yeah. Okay. And just to kind of bring us to an end, with you, with your talks and your writing about finding jobs, do you mention it all or do you have any experience on using user groups and conferences to help find jobs? Well, I actually, it’s funny because I, I also wrote, I just wrote another article on leveraging, I believe it’s called Leveraging Your Open Source Experience in the Job Hunt. Right. Yeah. It’s a great article. It’s a great article. Where, you really didn’t know this in the softball? Yeah. No. No. No. That one actually, I didn’t know this one. Okay. Well, you, it’s a great softball. They, because I talk about how these are all contacts. Okay. People that we know day to day, that we know, our colleagues in open source help us when we’re trying to find other jobs, they help, and we can use our open source experience on our resumes. Right. Because it is work experience. Work experience on your resume. Work experience on your resume doesn’t have to be paid. Right. And so, just as if you organized, you know, say you organized your kid’s baseball league. That’s worthwhile to put on your resume because, and you can tie it into a business need. Absolutely, the things you do in open source should go on your resume. Should, and, and you can talk about that and say, “Hey, look, you know what? These are the things that I’ve done on this project.” So, for instance, on my resume, I talk about the parent project. Uh-huh. And about how I’ve gone through and done these sorts of clean up things, about how I instrument the code for doing static analysis, and I, and I treat it as if it’s a project that I got paid for. Right. I didn’t, but in the eyes of the reader, that’s still valuable work experience. Right. And it’s, it’s different collateral. It’s. Yes. In a way, in a way you do get paid by, but it’s not through money. Right. It’s, it’s through recognition, through use, through. Recognition and gratitude. Showing people contributing back. Right. Recognition and gratitude are the, are the currency of what we do. And so, the other thing I like to say is that we need to thank each other more. We need to recognize each other more. We need to, you know, if, not only should, if you get some, if you find this tool that saves you a couple of hours of work, not only should you write a blog post about it, but you should send mail to somebody and say, “Hey, you know what? I just used this. It saved me an hour, and I want to thank you for it.” And that one minute, I can’t even tell you how much that means to software authors. To let you know you’re not in isolation. Right. Yelling out into the dark void. Right. That people are actually using this and appreciate it. That is absolute gold. You want to sit here and encourage open source? You want to encourage people to write these tools? Encourage them directly by letting them know. And that, and, and just, you know, the last thing is that, what, what you’re saying is, I have a friend who, Igor Polivoy, who I will introduce. Who does several Java projects. And every time he would get something, I work with him at Groupon. Every time he would get an email or some kind of contact saying, “Somebody used my project and they have 20 million records in their database and they’re using it.” They said, “It’s no problem.” The sense of, of the good feeling you could just see coming from him. Yep. Was, you know, he’d done this thing to scratch his own itch, but somebody else got used from it. He didn’t, he’s not thinking about, “Oh, I should have charged him.” He’s thinking, “Oh, I should have charged for that.” He’s thinking, “That’s really great.” And it’s funny. It’s a very different mindset. It is. And it’s funny because our day jobs don’t pay us in that. You, it’s not often, you know, sometimes at the end of a big project, upper management will say, “Hey, look, we’re gonna, we’re gonna bring in a couple dozen pizzas and everybody has pizzas in the lunchroom. And thanks for God, you know, for a job well done.” And that’s kind of gratitude. Yeah. But not the same as an email from somebody who goes, “Hey, I just discovered your, your website and it saved me X amount of time and, and it made my life so much easier. Thank you for doing that.” And so we all, we all owe it to the other authors, to open source, to, to help encourage that. And that’s, that just comes back. That’s just paying it forward because it’s gonna come back for everything that we’ve done. Well, thank you very much for taking the time to talk with me. Thanks, Mike. Thanks. I appreciate it.