page = ramblings from jessie: home
url = https://blog.jessfraz.com
Friday, January 22, 2021 · 9 min read
Last week I attended the Open Source Firmware Conference. It was amazing! The talks, people, and overall feel of the conference really left me feeling inspired and lucky to attend. Having been pushed to attend vendor conferences and trade shows through my career for various jobs, it was so refreshing to have the chance to hang out with folks from such a genuine community that really just want to help one another.
Last week, I had the pleasure of meeting with the Transposit team in San Francisco. Tech is a super small world and it turns out the two founders and I are separated by one-degree through several different people we know. In meeting them I closed many loops without even realizing it, but I digress… Their product is really cool, it exposes a SQL interface for interacting with numerous APIs at once.
Last week I got to see what it was like to be an investigative journalist for a day. It was thrilling. I will get into what I learned but first I waned to give some background on why I was doing this. I have a general curiosity for people. It’s interesting to me to uncover what people are motivated by. Humans are individual snowflakes and no one is exactly like the next.
I’ve had a bit of a crazy week. Tuesday, I got a tour of the Pentagon from a friend that is in the US Digital Service (USDS) for the Department of Defense (DoD), called the Defense Digital Service (DDS). Wednesday (the day of writing this), I shadowed a friend who is a surgical resident during their shift in a hospital. Friday, I have plans to shadow a friend who is an investment banker at a private equity firm and will do a follow up post.
I recently started a job at Microsoft. In my first week I have already learned so much about Windows, I figured I would try to put it all into writing. This post is coming to you from a Windows Subsystem for Linux console! I'm headed to Seattle because I'M JOINING MICROSOFT, at the airport wearing this awesome shirt from @listonb & @Taylorb_msft ���� pic.twitter.com/8rnAg1dsPd — jessie frazelle (@jessfraz) September 4, 2017
It all started innocently enough. I had “jfrazelle” as my GitHub handle for years, but my Twitter, IRC and other handles are all “jessfraz”. No one on GitHub was actually using “jessfraz” so I sat on it waiting to make my move. I’m currently on vacation this week so of course I was looking to break all the things. One thing you must know about me is that at no point was I thinking I hate this.
Last week, I gave a talk at Github Universe and afterwards several people suggested I write a blog post on it. Here it is. This post will cover intricacies of “choosing your battle” and how personal passion for a project might conflict with corporate motives. I have experienced open source from the side of the contributor, the side of the maintainer, and the side of the corporate-backed maintainer and contributor.