Biggest problem I think is really staffing the infrastructure tasks sufficiently.
You will get bled down to practically no headcount being allocated to infrastructure, with all the headcount assigned to "big bets" on the non open-source products and the "skunkworks" projects trying to pivot the company into something new.
Even when we had a team come in and get assigned to pick up a neglected piece of old technology instead of focusing on getting the maintenance solid and fixing all the shit in the backlog, it was all "big bet" features and when those fizzled the team got slowly cut down until the project failed.
Isn't this somehow a modern, self-inflicted disease? FOSS used to be developed to very high standards by individuals, without relying on expensive CI pipelines.
I'm using "infrastructure" in the same sense that the author described:
... as infrastructure -- triage and fix bugs from the backlog, optimize performance, increase security and reliability, pay down tech debt, simplify and automate ongoing maintenance
And CI pipelines don't need to be particularly expensive, and they're pretty critical really if you're building "infrastructure" in that sense. Otherwise you're just shipping code off to your customers to be the CI pipeline.
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Biggest problem I think is really staffing the infrastructure tasks sufficiently.
You will get bled down to practically no headcount being allocated to infrastructure, with all the headcount assigned to "big bets" on the non open-source products and the "skunkworks" projects trying to pivot the company into something new.
Even when we had a team come in and get assigned to pick up a neglected piece of old technology instead of focusing on getting the maintenance solid and fixing all the shit in the backlog, it was all "big bet" features and when those fizzled the team got slowly cut down until the project failed.
Isn't this somehow a modern, self-inflicted disease? FOSS used to be developed to very high standards by individuals, without relying on expensive CI pipelines.
I'm using "infrastructure" in the same sense that the author described:
And CI pipelines don't need to be particularly expensive, and they're pretty critical really if you're building "infrastructure" in that sense. Otherwise you're just shipping code off to your customers to be the CI pipeline.