Contributing To My Open Source Projects

Erik Darling here with Darling Data. And in today’s video, I’m not going to talk about SQL Server. Specifically, I’m going to talk about contributing to open source projects, which is a subject that has become nearer and dearer to my heart. Sort of like the metal shards that Iron Man is desperately trying to keep away from his. But the reason why I wanted to record this is because I feel like people are a little too shy about contributing to them. And the reason why I say that is because, look, if you’re here, you probably know I’ve been working on a couple of SQL Server monitoring tools. We have the Lite version and we have a full version. And I’ve got this Performance Studio application, which is a portable SQL Server query plan analyzer. And I want to, of course, start by acknowledging that these applications would not be near as good as they are if it were not for the reception that the SQL Server community has given them. Both requesting, well, not both, requesting features, contributing code and reporting bugs. These are all very, very valuable things. The part that I want to talk about today is requesting features. Because I love a feature request.

It’s like, cool, this thing could get better. The thing is, when you request a feature, you’ve most likely got some vision in mind for it. You likely have what it would look like in a perfect world to you when you think of this thing. I don’t have that when you request it. And so when someone requests a feature, the very first question that I ask them is, hey, do you want to contribute the code to do this? Sometimes they say yes, and that is absolutely fantastic. The process for that is, of course, they, you know, fork the repo and they either do the work themselves or they have their little robot companion, the way I have my little robot companion do a lot of the coding work. And, you know, they submit a pull request for it. And then I have my robot companion review their code changes. Sometimes there’s a few rounds of back and forth between the robots getting things right. Sometimes there’s some additional testing that has to be done. But overall, it’s a pretty smooth process. And the reason why I ask that is getting back to what I just said. When someone has a feature request in mind, they likely have the best idea of what that feature should look like. Right? So when I ask that question, though, sometimes people say, no, I don’t know how to code or no, I’m not familiar with the code base. You don’t have to be with me. Right? You can have your robot companions work on stuff and do things. It doesn’t have to be handwritten because mine certainly isn’t.

Right? I’m not sitting there writing every initial code that goes into these applications because I’m not a front end person. I am not a C sharp person. I’m a database person. And I have a very good vision or rather I had a very, very specific vision of the tools that I wanted to build. And I use the robots to help me do that. Without the robots, none of this would be possible. Right? Like I’m not learning C sharp and XAML and all the other stuff. I’m like, I’m using these well-defined languages and I’m saying, hey, robots, use these languages to build around the thing that I do or the things that I know, which was essentially the original set of sort of data collectors that feed all the charts and graphs in the monitoring tools. Right? Like all the stuff that comes in here. These are all things that I had written scripts and procedures for to gather over the years. And these are all the things that I knew I wanted to see in pretty charts and graphs.

So that that’s really how the whole thing started. There are some GitHub repos out there that probably do a lot more mission critical work for like, for example, the Linux kernel. It’s a pretty important one that wouldn’t, that probably don’t accept pull requests written by our little robot companions. I don’t have that particular brand of, um, I don’t know, uh, I guess, uh, importance to, to these because, uh, at the end of the day, anything that comes in here is fixable and is not going to like bring down infrastructure. Right? Like it’s like, you’re not going to see like the electric grid go out because like you, you, because you, you submitted a code that has a bug in it. Right?

It’s just something that can get fixed and cleaned up and it’s not a big deal. This is pretty low pressure stuff. It’s a free SQL Server monitoring tool. And while I do want it to be bug free and I do want it to be a great monitoring tool that remains free and remains out there in the community for everyone to be able to use and not have to give oodles and gobs of money to these monitoring tool companies. Right? Like I have a very specific mission. Um, I’m not making money off this, right? Uh, if anything, I’m probably losing money off this.

Uh, but I get paid in what I call petty cash and that petty cash is every time someone cancels a contract with a monitoring tool vendor and starts using this instead, I’m a happy camper. So please, if you have features, if you have things in mind that would make this better, don’t let the fact that you’re not a coder or you’re not a programmer or maybe you’re just a DBA hold you back. You can use your robot friends to implement that feature, get it right the way you want it and contribute it. I’m totally okay with that.

You don’t have to know everything inside and out. You don’t have to know every line of code. It doesn’t have to be perfect the first time. I’m happy just getting the feature submission and having something new in here that is helpful to people. So if you’re out there and you’re, and you’re looking at the GitHub repo and you’re thinking, wow, there’s a lot of stuff, but man, if it had this one extra thing, it’d be great.

And you’re like, you want to contribute and like, you want to make the feature request. That’s cool. Like sometimes I’ll think it’s cool enough to pick it up and do it on my own or think it’s easy enough to pick it up and do it on my own. And maybe it’s like something that doesn’t require a lot of interpretation, right?

Like sometimes there are some things that come through and I’m like, oh yeah, no, I get what you want that I can do that. But there are other times when it seems like more of a, I don’t know, sort of like someone else had their own very, very perfect idea of something when it came to their mind. But maybe like the description of it wasn’t quite clear or maybe there’s some, you know, room for interpretation in there.

I want you to be able to contribute to this. I’m not holding anyone back. You want to use your robots? That’s fine, right? It’s, again, it’s okay with me. What I care the most about though, is making sure that this is a great tool. The thing about open source stuff, and this has been said by many smarter people than me and probably, actually, you know what?

I’ll just say it the way I’ve always heard it. Open source is free software, but it’s not free development. Every time someone makes a feature request, that’s time that I have to spend implementing it. And while I don’t mind that, it’s also something where if you have a little robot friend and you could implement it, it would be a great help for me.

Because then that’s time that I get to spend doing something else, right? Working on other things. Spending quality time with the people in my life instead of, you know, sitting there and prompting and trying to get things right and going back and forth a little bit. So, if there’s a feature you like and there’s a feature you want, cool, you can make the feature request because, again, I love great ideas.

But that doesn’t always mean that those great ideas are going to get implemented quickly or immediately. If getting them implemented quickly or immediately is important to you, you could consider supporting the project monetarily, which gives me a kind of a little kick in the butt to get things in there a little bit faster, but not a lot of people have chosen to do that.

And again, that’s okay. I get paid in petty cash. So don’t worry about that. But if it’s something that’s really important to you or if this tool is helping you or your company, you could also consider supporting it in that way. Anyway, that’s probably about enough for this. Thank you for watching. I hope you enjoyed yourselves. I hope you’re enjoying this free software.

If you have any, you know, questions, comments, concerns, you have any feature requests, you have any bug reports, you have any ideas, you have any questions about it, GitHub is wide open for you. GitHub is also free, right? You can do that stuff. Maybe you’ll have to sign up for an account there if you really want to do something, but I promise there’s no head biting going on.

Anyway, I’m not quite Linus level of grumpy yet. Maybe someday I’ll get there, but not today. Anyway, thank you for watching. Enjoy your weekend. I believe it’s Friday. At least that’s what the robot calendar is telling me. Anyway, goodbye.