Weave Scope and Flux to participate in Hacktoberfest
In this post, Daniel, our community manager at Weaveworks explains how Weaveworks (Flux and Scope teams included) is participating in the upcoming Hacktoberfest and why it’s such a great way to get started in Open Source development.
My name is Daniel Holbach and I'm a Community Manager at Weaveworks.
One thing I noticed, when I was applying for a job at Weaveworks, was that almost every page on the Weaveworks website mentioned “open source” somewhere. Aside from the bigger, better known projects such as Weave Net, Flux, Scope, eksctl and Cortex (which just found its new home in the CNCF Sandbox!), a huge amount of our work is publically available on Github. Knowing a bit of my background, you can probably guess that this was sort of a requirement for me: Weaveworks has strong roots in open source; being part of this wider community is part of our DNA.
I was particularly happy when in our last Scope community meeting, Satyam Zode brought up Hacktoberfest. Since then we’ve looked at issues in the project, agreed on suitable ones for new contributors. When I talked to Michael Bridgen, the Flux maintainer, we agreed that Flux would follow suit.
Hacktoberfest!
I’m very happy we are part of this initiative. Hacktoberfest is a brilliant event, it’s a low-barrier way to get involved in Open Source. The idea is that throughout October 2018 you get to know and work on Open Source projects. If during this time you propose five pull requests, you get a limited edition Hacktoberfest 2018 T-shirt. Make sure you register at the Hacktoberfest beforehand.
From personal experience I know that nobody is born an open source maintainer. It takes a pioneering spirit as well as a lot of time to go through the docs, and tinker with the code. A project with members who are available, friendly, encouraging, somewhat organised and happy for newcomers to join makes this even easier. This way it can become a learning experience for everyone involved. The Scope and Flux teams definitely meet all of these characteristics.
Why Scope?
Weave Scope was one of the first projects I got to see from Weaveworks. It’s what makes clusters, containers and processes observable. Troubleshooting suddenly becomes straight-forward. 400M pulls from Docker Hub are testament to how many folks depend on this.
For a while now, we’ve been running Scope community meetings and it’s great to see how people from different parts of the globe use it for different things and keep extending it.
Weave Scope as a project is also quite obvious. You can immediately see and experience how your change makes a difference. It has frontend and backend bits, uses modern toolkits. What’s not to like?
Why Flux?
Weave Flux is essentially what powers our GitOps story. Once you start using it, your team can focus on the development process again because Flux deploys new images and config automatically to the cluster.
Michael and team have been busy in the past couple of months, getting out releases every couple of weeks and more and more contributors have been helping out. Particularly the Helm integration was of great interest. I’ve been working alongside the team in past months and they’re an incredibly friendly bunch who work hard to get “ops by pull request” just right for everyone.
I’m both happy and proud Weaveworks is participating in Hacktoberfest and I'm looking forward to meeting you online! If you get stuck anywhere or have general feedback, please reach out! I’m @dholbach on Github and Twitter.
