Keeping up with open source -The maelstrom of constantly updating libraries can overwhelm a software development company
2:00 PM - 2:30 PM EST
Jobber is a fast-growing SaaS company that fundamentally changes how home service businesses deliver their services and interact with customers. Between our web and mobile solutions we directly depend on approximately 500 libraries. This brings in an additional 5000 transitive dependencies. This means we typically have at least 20 and up to 50 libraries that could be updated each month.
That's potentially a lot of work. And our developer's hours need to be prioritized between library maintenance, feature work and the regular fact of code that made sense at the time but now is tech debt that needs attention.
Attendees will get an overview of the challenges faced trying to balance all these priorities and approaches we've done (or considered). And then we'll conclude with our current approach that should scale as Jobber and our open source needs grow.
About John Zittlau
John is a Distinguished Software Engineer who has worked as a software developer for more than 27 years. He has been involved in writing code for embedded processors of medical devices to 3D game engines to high availability/high scalability enterprise web applications. He has worked at startups of 10 people to large corporations of many thousands.
John is always happiest working on the edge where a simple google search doesn't lead to the answer. He is also always an advocate for the engineers at a company. Making sure they are allowed to grow in their craft and also that their voices are heard.
John currently spend his time helping Jobber navigate the fun of having its engineering organization more than double in size three times in six years (from around 15 to over 150).
In his spare time John enjoys do wood-working, 3D printing and build and fly quad-copters.
