Open Source

On submitting trivial patches

Hacker News points to this Linux kernel patch, done by a 4-year old. With some assistance, of course, but still impressive. And while the story is cute, the comments are even better. In particular, a link to this email from Linus Torvalds, talking about the importance of the small and trivial contributions.

To me, the biggest thing with small patches is not necessarily the patch itself. I think that much more important than the patch is the fact that people get used to the notion that they can change the kernel – not just on an intellectual level (“I understand that the GPL means that I have the right to change my kernel”), but on a more practical level (“Hey, I did that small change”).

GitHub : 100 million repositories

GitHub is celebrating a very important milestone – they are now hosting 100,000,00 repositories. This is truly a remarkable achievement! Congratulations!

And while many of these are private, the majority, no doubt, are the Open Source projects. GitHub is indeed a cozy home for the Open Source Software, and the world wouldn’t be the same without GitHub.

Read their blog post for some cool statistics. Here are a few numbers to get you going:

100,000,000 repositories (obviously)
31,000,000 developers
1.1 billion (enough with the zeros already) contributions
Founded in 2008 (10 years ago), raking up mere 33,000 repositories that year (who could have known?)
Nearly one third of all repositories was created during the last year (insane growth)
On average, 1.6 new repositories created every second

Knowing these numbers, and working with GitHub on a daily basis, it’s difficult to imagine how crazy are all the usual metrics (daily/monthly active users, visitors, page views, etc.).

I’m raising a pint to the next 10 years and many repositories. And really hoping their recent acquisition by Microsoft is going to help, rather than the usual.

IBM To Acquire Red Hat

Here are some huge news to wake up to on this Monday Morning: IBM To Acquire Red Hat, Completely Changing The Cloud Landscape And Becoming World’s #1 Hybrid Cloud Provider.

That’s a lot to process in the morning. But if Red Hat was to be acquired by someone, I think IBM is one of the better choices. The deal size is $34 billion … and people are still saying that there is no way to make money with Open Source Software.

Here’s the story at Slashdot, which will get quite a few flame wars as the day progresses.

Go Monorepo

As a maintainer and contributor to multiple, and often related, git repositories, I often find myself thinking that there must be a simpler way.

Consider, for example, a variety of CakePHP plugins that we develop and maintain at work. Sure, each one provides a completely separate bit of functionality and has its purpose as a standalone project. But, at the same time, they all have enough overlap that we use a common cakephp-plugin-template repository to keep things in sync, and also require cakephp-utils plugin from all of them.

It’s only natural to consider other ways of doing things. Sure, I tried git submodules before, but they don’t quite cut it. Something is still missing.

Today I came across the Go Monorepo website. Which makes me wonder even further down this road. There are also a few other tools and alternatives mentioned in this article.

That’s not something that I’ll jump into right now, but it’s definitely something I’ll consider to try out in the nearest future.

Top 100 PHP functions

“Top 100 PHP functions” is a list of the top 100 most frequently used PHP functions, from the analysis of the 1,900 open source projects. If you are still learning PHP, this list is a good overview of what you’ll see the most in real life projects.