Introducing Open Source Fridays
We’re excited to share that Mattermost has launched Open Source Fridays as a way to help our Engineering team have a structured opportunity to support and get involved in more open source projects inside and outside of Mattermost.
Why supporting open source is important to Mattermost
Mattermost is built using a wide swath of open source technology, including big open source projects like Go, React and Kubernetes, but also many smaller projects like squirrel and TinyColor. Mattermost Cloud is on the bleeding edge of a highly secure, dedicated cloud environment, and open source technology lets us build a large scalable system that doesn’t require re-inventing the Mattermost core product.
We’ve found that it’s important to have a deep understanding of technologies to effectively use them. Contributing to these projects enables to build that deep understanding, benefit the projects used, and makes it easier to include high-priority changes in upstream projects. Moreover, it allows engineers to share and retrieve knowledge on how best to accomplish solutions and influence the direction these projects take.
In addition, a significant portion of Mattermost was built by open source contributions. These contributions and the community built around them are key reasons for the success of Mattermost. It gives users and customers a chance to see how the project they rely on is built and to contribute back to it. Having a strong open source community has been integral to recruitment, giving the company some of its best hires while at the same time providing an avenue for contributors to turn a hobby into a way of living.
Finally, many of Mattermost’s most successful plugins and integrations were not built as part of a roadmap, but by innovators at the company or in the community who had an idea or need and ran with it. These integrations are core to what make Mattermost a successful platform for developers and others. Contributing to existing or creating entirely new integrations and plugins that truly improve and address workflow efficiencies helps us continue to make Mattermost an effective collaboration tool for our users.
What are Open Source Fridays?
While contributing open source initiatives is important to Mattermost, carving out time to work on projects outside of our normal responsibilities can be challenging. That’s why every Friday at Mattermost will now be dedicated to working on open source initiatives. This could include contributing to non-Mattermost open source projects, writing or recording developer content, developing open source integrations and plugins for Mattermost, or any other activity that helps support open source initiatives.
Stay tuned for updates
If you’re interested in following along and learning more about the open source initiatives we’ll be working on as part of Open Source Fridays, check out the Open Source Fridays channel on the Mattermost community server, or follow us on Twitter for weekly #opensourcefriday updates!
