Fallthrough

We all use open source software on a daily basis. Even though the software is free to consume doesn't mean it's free to produce. Over the years, there have been many attempts to support open source development financially, from companies that sell support to foundations and many things in between. On this week's episode, Angelica and Matt are joined by Filippo Valsorda and Daniel McCarney to discuss Geomys, an open source maintenance company. The goal of Geomys is to provide open source maintainers with stable income to support themselves financially while doing the very important work of keeping open source projects well maintained. The group discusses the why and how of Geomys, what the day to day is like, and open source maintenance as a whole.

For our supporters, this episode contains extra chapters of discussion. Get access by signing up at https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe.

Thanks for tuning in and happy listening!

Notes:

Table of Contents:
  • Prologue (01:11)
  • Chapter 1: Geomys, An Open Source Maintainership Company (04:27)
  • Chapter 2: Day To Day At Geomys [Supporter Only] (12:29)
  • Chapter 3: How Are Things Going? (12:29)
  • Chapter 4: The Geomys Team [Supporter Only] (19:34)
  • Chapter 5: Expansion Possibilities (19:34)
  • Chapter 6: Interacting With The Community (30:42)
  • Chapter 7: Building A Geomys Of Your Own [Supporter Only] (40:09)
  • Chapter 8: Preventing Burnout (40:09)
  • Chapter 9: Prioritizing Work (52:18)
  • Appendix UNPOP: Unpopular Opinions (58:06)

Socials:
  • (01:11) - Prologue
  • (04:27) - Chapter 1: Geomys, An Open Source Maintainership Company
  • (12:29) - Chapter 2: Day To Day At Geomys [Supporter Only]
  • (12:29) - Chapter 3: How Are Things Going?
  • (19:34) - Chapter 4: The Geomys Team [Supporter Only]
  • (19:34) - Chapter 5: Expansion Possibilities
  • (30:42) - Chapter 6: Interacting With The Community
  • (40:09) - Chapter 7: Building A Geomys Of Your Own [Supporter Only]
  • (40:09) - Chapter 8: Preventing Burnout
  • (52:18) - Chapter 9: Prioritizing Work
  • (58:06) - Appendix UNPOP: Unpopular Opinions

Creators and Guests

Host
Matthew Sanabria
Matthew is an engineering leader focused on building reliable, scalable, and observable systems. Matthew is known for using his breadth and depth of experience to add value in minimal context situations and help great people become great engineers through mentoring. Matthew serves the Go community as a member of GoBridge. In his spare time, Matthew spends time with his family, helps grow his wife's chocolate business, works on home improvement projects, and reads technical resources to learn and tinker.
Producer
Angelica Hill
Guest
Daniel McCarney
Daniel McCarney is a systems security engineer focused on applied cryptography and internet-scale infrastructure. He’s a maintainer of Rustls, a high-performance TLS implementation written in Rust, and has made numerous open source contributions spanning both the Rust and Go communities. While at Let’s Encrypt, he helped design and standardize the ACME protocol (RFC 8555), developing the software and specification that has since secured over 500 million domains. He lives in the Laurentides, Quebec, where the forest provides the perfect setting for digging in to complex challenges.
Guest
Filippo Valsorda
Filippo Valsorda is a cryptography engineer and open source maintainer. He’s been a maintainer of the Go cryptography standard library since 2018, first at Google, where he led the Go Security team, and then as a professional, full-time, independent maintainer. He worked on the design of the Go Checksum Database and of TLS 1.3. Before Google, he was on the Cryptography team at Cloudflare. He attended the Recurse Center.
Producer
Kris Brandow

What is Fallthrough?

A deep and nuanced conversational podcast focused on technology, software, and computing.