André Staltz:

I used to believe there was mass collaboration on the internet. But I’ve realized that collaboration is extremely hard. It does not scale, especially not at internet scale. The examples we look up to are either not collaborative on the microscopic level, or are rare exceptions to the rule.

The examples he’s referring to are “Wikipedia, open source projects such as Linux, hacktivism, and crowdsourced science experiments such as Rosetta@home.”

This post is sobering, but André speaks from a lot of experience.

André Staltz collected data from OpenCollective and GitHub so he could get some numbers behind his questions around the sustainability of donations in open source.

The results I found were shocking: there were two clearly sustainable open source projects, but the majority (more than 80%) of projects that we usually consider sustainable are actually receiving income below industry standards or even below the poverty threshold.

Read his full piece to learn about his collection methodology and read his full analysis of the findings.

We’re talking with Andre Staltz, creator of Manyverse — a social network off the grid. It’s open source and free in every sense of the word. We talked through the backstory, how a user’s network gets formed, how data is stored and shared, why off-grid is so important to Andre, and what type of user uses an “off-the-grid” social network.

André Staltz with an apt metaphor for learning JS abstractions such as Promises, Iterables, and Observables:

I have been teaching these concepts in conferences and workshops, and over time I have found an elegant summary of these abstractions, layed out in a pyramid. In this blog post I’ll provide a tour through these layers in the pyramid.

André Staltz:

I’ve just given my third programming talk where I use only my IDE (integrated development environment) for live coding and no other presentation tool. I noticed the audiences were very pleased with these talks, and I think it’s correlated to using an IDE and not a slides program.

If you’ve ever watched one of André’s talks, you know he gives good talks regardless of whether or not he’s using an IDE. But he makes a good case for their use in general and goes in to great detail* on how to do it well.

*even explaining each individual editor setting and why they were selected