A Developer’s Journey: Supporting Your Public Goods Work - Berkeley 2024

[Music] this is just going to be a casual chat uh with myself and BR here I just a little bit more of an introduction I guess um you know previously uh well currently I work on open source Observer with Ray and Carl you've probably seen them talk today uh but um uh at some point in my career in the past I worked in the government uh I also uh worked on a project that kind of derived from an open source project from that go from the government um um which you know is kind of a good tie into some of the things that BR has done because I think she has a really amazing um kind of path to to where she is now um yeah uh with you know yeah actually I shouldn't say any of this I think you should let her talk so yeah so BR tell me you know um yeah how how have you arrived at open source it's a pretty broad question is this working all right yeah so when I was about 18 years old I was was working for a startup that got sold to Yahoo and I didn't want to go through that again in the rest of my life so I decided to work on other things right so I had a very early experience with just like working on something really hard that was you know proprietary and got sold and got sold again and became unrecognizable so for a while I worked on Sadia so Sadia was an open source well still is an open source package man manager with a little Marketplace on top and we called it the alternative app store for jailbroken iPhones and iPads and so what we did instead of having Venture funding or getting sold to Yahoo was a little tiny marketplace where people could use the open source tools that we made and that's like that was my first experience working on open source professionally your work in the government I think um you know one of the things I guess I wanted to kind of dig into I would say in that specific regard you know web 3 people might be more averse to things that are very like when I say public I mean like you know Big Brother government public kind of things right but uh I think it's very interesting to hear like what kind of Open Source work that they're doing there actually you can have a day job working in open source for the government turns out um so yeah so I was working at ATF which is part of the general Services Administration this is a Consulting team made of Engineers designers product managers and so on and so forth who are federal employees who work in the general Services Administration and work on almost entirely open source software so they partner with other government agencies who have some kind of Technology problem they need to solve and work with them and help them pick software and usually quite boring software right these are what we say very fondly boring problems they should be solved with boring technology right it's like you need a database but also then when I was at ATF I worked on a platform that was available for government called cloud. goov and that was based on open source Cloud Foundry software sort of a Heroku esque platform as a service and all of the code we wrote was also open source and we were able to get um a sort of security compliance authorization fed ramp authorization even though it was open source through some very careful negotiation um but yeah so that's that's that's so cool um you were telling me at some point you know we've been we were chatting about this prior um but uh that you know Building open source in the government is actually something that um that ends up actually working out like the they've started to realize the government has started to realize that it actually works in its favor from you know from a quality perspective like uh can you tell me a little bit more about that yes so that's part of why atnf advocates for open source software so what atnf is trying to do is to get other government agencies to buy and build better software but so when most software in the government is made by contractors and then if you require those contractors to do open source work while they're working for you they will deliver better quality because they don't want to be embarrassed by shipping just like really shitty software when everybody can see their name on it yeah the government has open sourced at this point that are in use by other organizations like widely and what are they like I'm very curious it's less common because a lot of the time it's like really custom for the agency's really specific thing but there's a couple of them that are fun um one is just if you go to analytics. usa.gov you can see like visits on government websites and like what the top most visited Government website is today it's usually the United States Postal Service like where's my package um but there's a couple other governments that have like copied that code to deploy oh that's amazing yeah just i w we should capture that in Oso to see what governments are you know that's cool that's really cool the thing I work on now also it's called e- regulations was originally written by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to make their regulations because they were a brand new agency at the time to make their regulations more readable by the public and so they have it's a website that kind of makes the regs more readable and makes the sub-regulatory guidance we're getting really government here um makes the sub-regulatory guidance easier to find in context with the regulations and then the agency I work for the Medicaid staff needed something like that so they took the code that ATF had improved that cfpb had written and then deployed it internally there and that's what I work on but it's still open source you know if you were to start again today what what's what's the pathway you would you would you know like what does that look like actually yes yes that is that is my pitch it's a pretty good good day job right like you get paid not like you would in one of the big companies that makes a lot of money you don't definitely don't get paid like that but it does get paid better than like working at your average nonprofit um so and you get to work on open source all day so yes the paths are I mean if you have some experience you can work for like atnf or usds these like inhouse agencies where you can you know be a federal employee right and other also other federal agencies will hire some folks for their like Digital Services groups and go in and try to do on stuff but a more practical path especially if you don't have a ton of experiences to work for one of these government contractors but they are not just the boo Allen Hamiltons the deits like those are yeah those are a thing you can work for but there's a lot of small businesses um that are often called like Digital Services Coalition like the one I work for which is like a very obscure company based in Chico it's got 40 people um but this is what I do all day and so looking for one of these small business government contractors that works with Health and Human Services or all different kinds of agencies awesome Round of Applause please for these folks thank you guys so much