OpenTelemetry — the merger of OpenCensus and OpenTracing — appeared in May of 2019, led by companies like Omnition (now a part of Splunk), Google, Microsoft, and others who are pushing the curve on observability. OpenTelemetry is a project within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) that has gathered contributors and supporters far and wide, becoming one of the most active projects found in open source today. It’s currently #2 behind only Kubernetes!

A growing number of car companies have made their autonomous vehicle (AV) datasets public in recent years. Daimler fueled the trend by making its Cityscapes dataset freely available in 2016. Baidu and Aptiv respectively shared the ApolloScapes and nuScenes datasets in 2018. Lyft, Waymo and Argo followed suit in 2019. And more recently, automotive juggernauts Ford and Audi released datasets from their AV research programs to the public.

On May 27, the first OpenObservability Conference was held to bring together leaders, practitioners, and users of leading open source observability tools for sessions on the experiences, strategies, and future of the industry. For the Logz.io team, as long-time proponents of open source, it was rewarding to see everyone come together to explore the challenges and opportunities of open source observability.

Today marks five years since the start of the Mattermost open source project! We reflected on this exciting journey and reminisced about our missteps along the way. We’ve had many laughs and wanted to share them with our community.

In my Puppet travels over the last 10 or so years, one topic has continued to arise time and again, and that has been the ability to scale open source Puppet to thousands of nodes. While the best route is to use Puppet Enterprise for solid support and a team of talented engineers to help you in your configuration management journey, sometimes the right solution for your needs is open source Puppet.

Implementing infrastructure using open-source software significantly reduces the total cost of ownership (TOC) of your infrastructure. Over the last few years, we’ve seen more and more companies moving to open source. These include Netflix, Uber, Visa, eBay, Wikipedia and AT&T. And this trend will only continue to grow. The migration is driven by better economics, improved flexibility, better integration capabilities and thus, the higher business value provided by the open source software.

This year, I got a unique opportunity to call in at Mattercon 2020 and give a talk about my experience working on Mattermost and open source software (OSS) in general. I talked about how OSS helped me grow as a self-taught developer and how working on issues from Mattermost’s repos helped me gain experience and confidence in software development. In this article, I will highlight some of the things I talked about and also throw in a few pointers related to working on OSS.