text stringlengths 0 2.68k |
|---|
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah, so I can imagine you would see "Okay, well, for this particular package" - and maybe I've got lots of packages, but I just drill down to one of them... Then I can see "Here are my top dependents", and top being - there's lots of different ways you can define what a top would be... But we can j... |
\[01:22:40.04\] You could also then use that interface to say "Okay, well, can you show me everyone that's on this specific version?" Or "Is 50% of my users stuck on an old version?" Or "Are they stuck on an insecure version?" as well, to be able to go "Well, we had this CVE three months ago, and most people..." Especi... |
There's a lot of data there, but being able to highlight where those key points are of leverage that are like "These things could be improved here", that would be one way of that kind of being manifested. |
The other way you could do it is rather than it be a UI, it's more like a notification system of being like "Oh, did you --" You've got the proactive kind of things of like your dependents have updated to your latest version, or your dependents are having problems with - they tried to upgrade to this thing, and "Here's... |
And maybe there's an AI element there, once you get to very large amounts of users, that you're like "Actually, this is too many downstream users to reach out to. Maybe I can empower Copilot or Claude through some kind of prompt that is like "I've described the changes in my changelog in a way that helps them upgrade f... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's kind of like telemetry via exhaust, too. You're not like literally tracking your users, you're tracking them through natural usage pattern of the ecosystem of open source... So you're not like ask them to opt into too much telemetry either. |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah. I really try not to be too invasive. I try not to track too much data about the individuals, and instead keep it at the project level... Because for one thing, the projects are all like licensed in a way, that says "Yeah, you can share this, and you can like understand this." The licenses let ... |
But also, most open source projects, they're all volunteers. Trying to pin requirements on an individual is asking a lot of someone who is probably not being -- like, they're just giving away their code. So instead it's like "Oh, well, we'll look at these as if you want to do something to help, then here's data that yo... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** \[01:26:22.00\] GitHub would just shut you down straight away. They're allowed to run Copilot or Dependabot at a large scale, but you wouldn't want -- it would be horrible for maintainers, to just have... You hear Daniel from Curl constantly saying like how many different AI bots, especially if it's... |
**Jerod Santo:** Have you found any information black holes in your desires for features, or tracking things? I mean, exact amounts of funding is an example, I guess... But anywhere else where you're like "Man, I could build this, but I went looking for the data and there's no data"? |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Ooh... So yeah, the funding one is a big one. The other thing that I'd really like is kind of more data around the non-code contributions... But that's really hard to get, right? |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah... |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Your Discords, and your Slacks are not open enough to be able to really index without -- you know, you need an API key, or you need a ghost user sat in a Discord, collecting everything... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. Now you're getting creepy; you're getting real creepy. |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah, it is way too much. There are tools -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** "There's Ecosyste.ms, again, tracking us... Get out of here, Ecosyste.ms...!" \[laughter\] |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** I'd start joining all the community Zoom calls with an AI chat log kind of thing... But no, there are tools like that. Bitergia has one that you can configure it to track your own community, and you can feed in mailing lists, and you can feed in your Slack, or your Discord, or similar. But you're ki... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. \[unintelligible 01:28:43.26\] structured. |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** ...like unstructured text of discussions of things, you're quickly into like "Right. Well, we're just going to try and have LLMs process everything here", and it's a horrible mess, and it's incredibly expensive. We use no LLM stuff in Ecosyste.ms, because we just don't have any budget for that kind ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, you do now... Our friends at AMP have free -- just advertising as I use it... And it's like free docs, essentially. I was just telling Jerod about this on the pod we're releasing on Friday... If you're not using AMPCode for free, at least two hours a day or so... |
**Jerod Santo:** Ad-supported. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...then you're missing out on a little bit of LLM work that you can get for free. |
**Jerod Santo:** Ad-supported, that's the way I'm saying it. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, yes, sorry. It is ad-supported. So you're getting advertised to, but you know... I think that if you're not using that and you have a use for a couple hours a day at no cost... One of the 17 advertisers they have in the network are supporting your open source, essentially. It's kind of cool. |
**Jerod Santo:** What else, Andrew? Anything else we didn't ask you about Ecosyste.ms-wise, or...? |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** I mean, we covered a lot... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** \[01:30:02.17\] I'm trying to think if there's anything... I think I covered most of my thinking of the future things, and that's mostly everything that I'm working on at the moment, is Ecosyste.ms. I haven't got any other side things... |
**Jerod Santo:** Octobox is dead, or...? |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Octobox is ticking along... GitHub copied most of the features of Octobox, and then we lost most of the customers... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** I still use it every day, but there's not a lot left there... So it still works, but it doesn't have any AI features, so it's not particularly interesting in terms of that aspect. Yeah, I think that nicely covers most of what I've been working on. |
**Jerod Santo:** Awesome. Well, it's really cool stuff. I've always been impressed by your abilities and willingness to just collect all the things, and then organize them, and give them back out for free for people to use for various reasons. It's probably exciting when you see somebody using it in a new way, that may... |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah, especially with the researchers. People will come to me and say "I'm working on this paper, that's like investigating ways that we can get LLMs to suggest better projects for you to use, or packages", or "We're trying to reduce LLMs coming up with old versions of things. Is there good ways of ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Drift. |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** The drift, that's it. That's an interesting challenge, without resorting, again, to kind of RAG or MCP - are there ways of doing short fine-tunes after the fact, of like "Here are the latest versions of things?" and people are doing some interesting research in that space using big chunks of Ecosyst... |
The other thing I just started noodling on is an open source taxonomy... So to try and define a taxonomy that describes the different facets of what makes an open source project -- you know, what does it do? Who is it for? What technologies does it use? There's about six different facets in about 130 different terms th... |
\[01:34:31.12\] And to be able to kind of like twist the picture a little bit, but in a fairly defined space, rather than in just arbitrary free text... Because again, you just end up in this soup of words, which is like "Yeah, we kind of just get very fluffy." And often, projects just don't have very well-defined ways... |
**Jerod Santo:** Where does that live? |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** That is on the Ecosyste.ms GitHub. There's also a really quick webpage I made of taxonomy.ecosyste.ms. It's literally just a few days ago, so it's not anywhere on the website, but it is on the GitHub org as oss-taxonomy. I'll get a link in the show notes. |
**Jerod Santo:** Awesome. Yeah, send us that... And anything else you wanna make sure we get into our show notes, so that y'all can just click through and find that and help Andrew figure out this taxonomy, so that we can all start to kind of formulate around it. Categorization is always useful, especially for otherwis... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I think this is fertile ground right there, honestly, because you've got so many... I would describe it as like ecosystem explorers. Previous to LLMs being a ubiquitous thing and agents helping you, you may have just stayed in the zone that you're comfortable in, because you're the mere human that c... |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah, definitely. There's also kind of the ability to see where are the gaps in a particular space. Where have there not been many people working, or there's only just this one old library. Is there an opportunity to kind of jump in and improve that? Or, as you say, you come into a new ecosystem and... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Exactly. |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** \[01:38:17.03\] And often it's like "Oh, well, actually in Erlang world we don't need Sidekiq, because we have OTP. It's kind of all built in." But to be able to learn what is the alternative to this thing is gonna be an interesting way of challenging that. And maybe also kind of breaking down some ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, let's close with this. What do you want from the world? You seem to be a pretty quiet guy... There's definitely a blog there, so you're active... I don't know how frequently you podcast. We haven't talked personally in years, at least me personally; maybe you've talked to him at least once, Je... |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Well, I have had my head down for -- basically, since leaving Tidelift, and then COVID happening, I basically just like got my head down and just started plugging away. I also started doing track days in a Subaru BRZ, which is an excellent way to get away from the computer. If you've got interesting... |
Collaboration is really what I would like to see more of, and I am starting to do more podcasts and various kinds of -- I started a working group with the Chaos Metrics people around package manager metadata, as trying to share the kind of learnings that I've done in developing Ecosyste.ms, and being able to kind of li... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow, very cool. I'm glad COVID is over, obviously... I'm glad that you're poking your head out of the hole, little rabbit, and showing the world what you've got. It's kind of cool, I like it. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.