Would you open your firm's codebase to other employees?

Would you open your organisation's source code for other employees to suggest improvements, find bugs, or contribute to?

I dropped by Day 2 of GovTech's Stack 2024 Developer Conference today and caught an intriguing panel on Open and Inner-sourcing.

Inner-sourcing is when organisations treat their codebase as open-source projects - allowing employees to contribute even if they are from another team.

Successful inner-sourcing

Steve Springett, Director of Product Security at ServiceNow, says inner-sourcing must address real problems faced by the organisation that span multiple teams. Adoption and continued usage are key metrics, he says.

For Evan You, creator of the popular Vue JavaScript framework, collaboration is key. Multiple stakeholders should first come to the table to identify a common problem to be addressed - and work actively on it.

How would you measure the success of an inner-sourcing initiative? Ashley Kramer, the interim CRO, CSO and CMO of GitLab, offered some metrics on this front:

• Time to market.
• Developer happiness.
• Faster business growth.

On software dependencies

Invariably, the topic of software dependencies came up.

We know that software dependencies can increase the risk of software vulnerabilities and add to legal risks given the complexity of tracking licenses.

According to Steve, many popular tools are working to flatten their dependencies and be more mindful of them. Indeed, a CLI tool was cited as paring dependencies down from 130 dependencies to a dozen.

Evan acknowledged that security and licensing are important considerations to reduce dependencies. However, he noted that this could be influenced by programming language ecosystems.

• Java has "a lot" less but still has dependencies.
• Go has close to zero/very few dependencies.

Ultimately, Evan says it boils down to the culture of the organisation. His advice? Don't recreate the wheel; but be mindful of (excessive) dependencies.

Opening up to open source

Finally, how can organisations open up to open source?

Ashley says organisations first need to see the value in contributing to open source projects. After that, it's merely a matter of ensuring:

• Proper guidelines.
• Defined responsibilities.
• Transparency in software development.

Do you code?

One key theme for this year's Stack is the use of AI for coding.

I've recently dabbled with using AI to code new Airtable custom scripts and it's proving a game changer - it's going to be my fun project for the holiday break.

What are your experiences with AI and coding?