Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software Highlight

Nathan Marz, who wrote the data-computation system Apache Storm, timed its release with his talk at a software conference called Strange Loop, open-sourcing the project live onstage. The announcement got a lot of attention, and he set up a mailing list for developers to give feedback, where he “spen[t] one to two hours a day answering questions.”82 Over the next year, he continued giving talks about Storm at conferences, meetups, and companies, noting that “all this speaking got Storm more and more exposure.” At this stage, the goal is distribution—getting