One Month in Open Source

Roughly one month ago, I left my job to work in open source. This is second time open source had a hand in me quitting something big and I think this time is the last.

Leaving academia

The first time was in quitting my PhD program. Two years into a PhD in classical condensed matter physics, I was doing a lot of simulation work. My work would start with some pen and paper theory and then be translated into numerical simulation. These simulations were distributed programs that would run on the university’s super computer. The output was often quite beautiful when rendered into movies or images so we lovingly called our graduate student office the “pretty picture department”. Academia, and physics in particular, has a long history of creating and using open source software and my department was no exception. This is where I got my first introduction to Linux and where I learned to cobble together open source libraries like FFTW and OpenMPI to create my simulation code.

While all of our code was built on open source software, there was a stark contrast between the collaborative model used to build these tools and how research itself proceeded. While our research findings were openly published, the academic community is more competitive than collaborative. Simulation code is rarely published so its difficult to build directly upon each others work. Even simply reproducing a paper from outside of your own research group can be extremely difficult.

It was natural to contrast this with my experience submitting my first small open source patches to projects like the Julia programming language. This was just a documentation change, but review was thorough and everyone was really encouraging as I fumbled my way a long.

In short, open source software showed me:

I cut my PhD short into a Masters program and hopped into the first software role I could find.

Leaving proprietary software

Fast-forward 5 years and I’ve been in various software roles from data science to infrastructure. Contributing to open source software and keeping up with what the community is building has been my constant hobby and companion in that journey and its been a huge asset in my career.

Building in open source has helped me:

That said, it always remained a hobby or a minor role in my work. I’d submit little bug fixes here and there or deploy an open source project at to solve some problem, but it was always outside the main focus.

I was always a little jealous of those folks that were constantly working in open source as part of their career, but it can be easy to write yourself out of ever having this career yourself. The most visible folks being paid to work in these spaces are often extremely senior engineers from prestigious companies. Want to contribute to Kubernetes? You shouldn’t be surprised if your code ends up being reviewed by a clever Google engineer for example. While this means you get to learn a lot by contributing, it can make it hard to imagine yourself on the other side of that review.

That said, if you never fully engage in those communities how could you ever really hope to find yourself being paid to contribute to them? If it’s your after work hobby it’s getting the fumes of your empty tank of motivation you know?

One month in open source

So the idea was this: just dive in there full time and give it your full attention. Build things, meet folks and contribute full time. After giving myself at least a month I’d see if I could land a role that would let me stay active in open source.

It’s important to mention at this point the absolutely massive pile of luck and privilege required to do something like this. Its truly rare to simply be able to fuck off from your career for a while to try something like this out. In my case it required knowing I could land a job again whenever I wanted it, having the money to live without work for a long time and a partner that actively pushed me towards the idea because I was excited about it.

I chose the Sigstore project to focus my effort and in particular the Fulcio certificate authority. I structured my time contributing to the project much like I would a full-time job. I spent about 60% of my time actively trying to fix issues and push the project along and then about 40% of my time trying to “onboard”. For the Sigstore project this mean playing with and learning about software supply chain security how ever I could.

Being open about what I was doing with the community meant a lot of people helped out. I openly stated I was looking to push my career towards open source supply chain security and was looking for mentorship and guidance if anyone was willing to help out. Many folks offered support and let me collaborate on their work. There are many many ways that folks helped out with this. Here are a couple examples that meant a lot to me:

Basically, the whole community was immediately receptive and I learned a huge amount!

Success?

Alright so, big success right? Yeah absolutely. After a couple weeks I knew this kind of work was a really great fit for me and I’d met a bunch of absolutely wonderful folks in the space. Not only that, but I was getting referrals and interviewing specifically for open source roles. Only two weeks into the month I was interviewing for three different roles. All three were in open source and two would keep me working in the Sigstore project in some way! This was mind blowing to me.

There were aspects of the job interview process that had completely changed as well. For the roles around Sigstore, I was already working with my potential future colleges. The risk for them was low and the risk for me was low. I knew what working together would look like, because we were already doing it. Even for the role that wasn’t connected to Sigstore, when asked “tell me about a recent technical challenge your had to work through” I could just point to the sigstore work. It was all open and documented! I just had to walk the interviewer through the background context.

Success!!

Ok, so where did I go in the end? I’m so excited that I’ll be starting work at Chainguard this Monday! They’re team is full of folks that have been building awesome tools in the open for years. Tools like:

Chainguard is deeply invested in the Sigstore project so I’m extremely excited that I’ll get to continue contributing upstream when I join their team. I’m completely humbled to be surrounded by folks with so much experience building in open source and can’t wait to help out with their big mission:

Make software supply chains secure by default ❤️

This could have been easier

Remember that bit about the how much luck and privilege I needed to take the time to do this? In retrospect, the leap of faith was absolutely worth it and I really wish I’d done something similar earlier, but the barrier to even thinking about doing something like this was really high!

Like I said, I had financial and emotional support in taking this risk, but I also already knew the right communities to participate in and already know a lot about open source contribution. It made my time very effective and that is a lot of what lead to my success.

This could have been easier though and I’d like to make it easier for folks that want to take the same leap. If you’re interested in get into open source and want some mentorship or advice about how to get started please reach out! I’d love to help others see the impact they can make and the communities that they can be a part of ❤️