🆕 NOW AVAILABLE!
Approachable Open Source, my brief book about the open source movement!
Purchase paperback, digital, or bundled.
“I've written this book as a new entry in the compendium of open source thought. I don't fancy myself a thought-leader and for that we are all fortunate. But it is informed by years of success and failure working with open source software. The advice is honest; the vision bold; the mandate modest.”
Approachable Open Source is a perennial, full-spectrum primer on the open source software landscape. Discover the broad connections between you, your team, your company, and your community. Learn how to approach and enable impactful, equitable, and attainable outcomes.
This book is for the curious, the busy, or the eager technologist that wants to level up their relationship with open source software. That might be you! You use open source software today at work or at school, and I promise your talent and perspective, intentionally channeled, is the latent energy many communities need.
Perfect for:
| role | takeaway |
|---|---|
| 🎓 students | Understand the history, context, and potential of open source software. |
| ⌨️ developers | Engage upstream across a full-spectrum of activities |
| 🔧 maintainers | Level up your repo with purpose. Create self-sustaining community. Avoid burn-out. |
| 💼 enterprise | Start, and scale. Secure open source dependencies and understand legal risks. Unlock your teams' future. |
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Curious to know where we are in the process?
- ✅ Proposal Written
- ✅ Pitch Accepted
- ✅ Draft Complete
- ✅ Editing Round 1
- ✅ Editing Round 2
- ✅ Editing Round 3
- 🛑 ABA ceases publishing new works
- 🗺️ Charting a new course
- ✅ Manuscript formatting
- ✅ Book producer found
- ✅ approachableopensource.com built!
- ✅ Proofreading
- ✅ Foreward Written
- ✅ Off to the printer!
Brian lives in Chanhassen, Minnesota but hails from Manitowoc, where it was always cooler by the lake and is now a fantastic ice-breaker at parties. He has four boys that keep him bald. He does a little of everything. Sometimes that’s called being a unicorn 🦄, duck 🦆, or a jack-of-all-trades 🧰, but he likes to land on the Seussical-form—Sneelock of the Circus 🎪!
With a career spanning many roles, from developer, UX team of one, product manager, analyst, and freelancer, Brian brings an experienced and broad approach to many disciplines. Him and his wife Megan’s small business keeps them exhausted and grounded in customer delivery, innovation, and warrantee-voiding laser maintenance. He’s been published in Smashing Magazine, CSS-Tricks, and led workshops at Web Design Day and the Node.js Collaborator Summit. Open source software threads into many aspects of his life, and has opened doors he’d never thought imaginable. It can do that for you too.
When not writing or working within open source software, Brian lives out programming tropes of drinking coffee and woodworking. He enjoys soccer, playing games with his sons, especially X-Wing or Chess, and never turns down a milkshake. Him and Megan spend as much time outside as they can muster, often playing with their kids, deepening the pickleball rivalry on their makeshift court, chasing clouds, or digging up the yard.
Be sure to check out some of my favorite things from now and then:
| Thing | Why | Tech Stack |
|---|---|---|
| nodejs.org | Helping maintain one of the most consequential websites in our ecosystem. Learning lots. Helping others do the same. My proudest moments are the new contributors, the Grace Hopper attendees, and the redesign. | NextJS |
| makeapullre.quest | A shelved community resource dedicated to improving the quality of writing & ease of assessing code changes. Sorta on hiatus. Great URL. | next-i18n-starter |
| next-i18n-starter | I wrote this because I found it hard to compose all the demos and docs together into what resembled a fully functioning content-centric website. | NextJS |
| Sweet Love Adornments | Megan's pretty killer etsy shop and website - since replaced by Shopify | NextJS, Netlify CMS |
| Walls | A digital place to preserve the ❤️ Megan put into our homes. | 11ty, Pantograph |
| Pattern Lab | The open source project I was the lead maintainer of for many years. | Node, lerna, auto |
| compassrose.js | My first real open source effort. I've recently hosted it on netlify and left the code unaltered as possible, a sort of time capsule. | jQuery |
| DoneDaily | One of my first public web apps. I've recently hosted it on netlify and left the code unaltered as possible, a sort of time capsule. | Grunt, sass, Respond, yepnope, jQuery, knockout |
| Simple Shift Scheduler | One of my first public web apps. Built for my father-in-law's business. I've recently hosted it on netlify and left the code unaltereed as possible, a sort of time capsule | jQuery, AngularJS, Bootstrap |