It’s 22 months since I found myself frustrated with writing boilerplate instructions to install simple, but necessary software in every tutorial I wrote for clients and for my own open source work.

In this article post I’ll walk you through the journey of the past two years from the initial creation, through to growing the community, getting the first sponsored app and what’s next. There will be code snippets, and technical details, but there should be something for everyone as we celebrate the two year anniversary of the project.

In 1984 John Gage of Sun Microsystems was credited as saying “The Network is the computer.” Almost four decades ago, John had a vision of distributed systems working together to be greater than the sum of their parts.

For this article, I surveyed the land of hosted IDEs and it turns out that we’ve progressed beyond running VS Code on an iPad whilst sipping a cocktail.

You can still do that, but there’s way more to it today and I’ll take you through some of use-cases and add my own thoughts. There’s also a practical guide at the end to get started with the open source VS Code browser by Coder.

This is my third eBook on Go, and it’s one of the ways I’m supporting my time to make open source contributions and lead the OpenFaaS community. The book covers samples, examples and techniques that I’ve learned over the past 5-6 years.

The point is not to be an 800-page tomb with tenuous links between content, but code from real open source applications that are run in production at scale.

There’s been over 300 copies sold already and I’m offering a money back guarantee if anyone should feel it didn’t meet their expectations.

Alex Ellis:

I wanted to write to you all and share that I’ve launched my first eBook called “Serverless For Everyone Else” - within the first three hours of launch, nobody bought a single copy and I thought that I’d got it all wrong.

Alex digs into the gritty details of why he wrote the book and what happened after his initial failure. And since Alex is super nerdy like you and me, the post is filled with fun moments like this one:

How did I fulfil the upgrade / discount? I did it by writing a function and deploying it to my Raspberry Pi, so that Gumroad would send a webhook, my code would query the dollar amount, and then send out an email to the customer over AWS SES.

About 18 months ago I started a project which had to develop directly against containerd with a full Linux system.

This presented a problem which I’d not really encountered before - Docker and Kubernetes on my Mac were no longer enough, I needed a full Linux environment, and so did the community.

This is how it went and what we learned along the way.

The Raspberry Pi Zero is five years old, has limited RAM, a slow CPU, and poor I/O, but can it still handle Cloud Native workloads like containers? I’ll show you my experiment where I got “nerd sniped” and spent far too much time trying to get faasd (a light-weight OpenFaaS version) working on the device.

Alex Ellis:

This post by a community member from India shows how to use GitHub actions to build, push and deploy to OpenFaaS anywhere - whether in the cloud or on an RPi at home. The best part is that this is a fully multi-arch setup, and uses the new Docker buildx with GitHub Actions.

How do you respond when someone asks:

Is Kubernetes right for us?

Where do you start? Let’s talk about IT modernisation, beginning with the problem that needs to be solved, and exploring any constraints that are obvious.

Gone are the days of contending with dozens of README files just to get the right version of helm and to install a chart with sane defaults.

arkade (ark for short) provides a clean CLI with strongly-typed flags to install charts and apps to your cluster in one command.

Being a leader is tough and leads to burn-out at least once or maybe even a few times. But why? If you’ve been building, leading, or maintaining open source, then this post from Alex Ellis should be on your “to read” list.

In this post I want to introduce the reader to five pressures that I have encountered over the past five years of building, leading, and maintaining Open Source Software (OSS) with community. This essay is primarily about being a leader in Open Source, but I believe it applies outside of technology too.

My aim is to foster understanding and empathy between contributors, community members, users, and maintainers. I would also like for maintainers and leaders in Open Source to feel a sense of solidarity in their shared burden.

We’re talking with Alex Ellis, the founder of OpenFaaS — serverless functions made simple for Docker and Kubernetes. We talked about the back story and details of OpenFaaS, “the curious case of serverless on Kubernetes,” the landscape of open source serverless platforms, how Alex is leading and building this community, getting involved, and maintainership vs leadership.