tmastro

Hey Vlad, I'm a co-founder of DevFlight (YC W'19). We're working on a solution to this problem and I'd love to talk to you. Email is in my profile if you're interested.

Great question. At this point, we’re focused on partnering with core maintainers of a project. As you’ve stated, these are the individuals who have control over what gets implemented in a project and ensuring project stability. However, we are also exploring ways to get expert contributors involved in the future.

Thanks for the question! Many companies are already paying or willing to pay for open-source software, especially when a lot of their critical infrastructure in production is open-source. This is becoming a more common occurrence as open-source rises in popularity. In many cases it’s cheaper and faster for a company to pay expert maintainers rather than hire more developers or get their current developers up to speed (and keep them up to speed) on the open-source software they use.

This is an interesting idea. Making open-source more sustainable definitely requires an aggregation of resources. I think something like what you’re describing would help make it easier for maintainers to collect donations, and for more people to give them, so it would be worth exploring.

Very fascinating, I will definitely listen to this. Thanks for sharing!

Your point about donations and grants is a good one. Working with us does not mean maintainers have to exclusively use contracts to make money. Making open-source more sustainable will definitely require an aggregation of resources. We’ve learned from maintainers that donations can also have unintended consequences and create certain levels of expectations from the individuals and companies that make them. However, for some projects the donation model can work well, so we definitely encourage maintainers to also accept donations in these situations. Vue.js is a perfect example (https://vuejs.org/).

Thanks for that feedback. We start by collecting publicly available GitHub information related to the maintainer’s repo. This includes looking at who has engaged with projects by doing things like submitting issues, pull requests, and stars. We also use Twitter and any community channels the maintainer has created (Slack, Gitter, Discourse, etc.). Then we act as the maintainer’s sales team by reaching out to these leads with customized messages. We find the right people within an organization to discuss how the maintainer can add value to the company, and we negotiate contracts based on the custom plan we’ve developed with the maintainer.

Co-founder here. Absolutely! We’re working with the wonderful maintainers of projects like Caddy Server (https://github.com/mholt/caddy) and OctoberCMS (https://github.com/octobercms/october). We’ll be able to share more of the maintainers we’re partnering with soon.

You are right, but "could one day be the best way" didn't have the same ring to it :)

Co-Founder here!

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I've interviewed with plenty of companies that don't do white board interviews. This doesn't mean they don't test for experience and aptitude. They just use different, often more appropriate tests, such as take home projects, pair programming and code reviews. I bet you these companies would disagree that their interview format results in hiring talent at the bottom of the curve.

We built this site for developers to find jobs that use interview techniques that model their work in the real world, without whiteboards or riddles.

Thanks for the thoughtful response. Would you be willing to talk to me about your process? You can reach me at the email address on my profile or let me know how I can contact you.

What do you look for that only 3-4 people who applied are able to demonstrate? Interested to learn from your experience.

Mainly Ruby on Rails

I'm in a very similar situation and would love to connect. We may be able to help each other. If you're interested let me know how I can get in touch.