TL;DR
About a year ago, Agora Games GitHub account. External open source work refers to projects that we contribute to in off-hours and may or may not have anything to do with video games because we’re swell folks like that.” How’d we do in our open source efforts over the last year? Read on…
THE BRASS TACKS
In 2011, we open sourced 33 projects. Obviously not all of these projects are going to “stick”, but one man’s trash is another man’s treasure right? The projects aren’t trash, BTW. A few projects came out of internal company-wide Hack-A-Thon sessions that we run every 2 months, but a fair number of them are taken from production applications. In looking at the 2012 project breakdown, by language, we have Ruby (22), Python (3), CoffeeScript (3), JavaScript (2), C++ (2), PHP (1). 7 of our engineers and 21 external people contributed to the various projects that we open sourced in 2012. Contributions range from clarifications in documentation to major new features that are developed, documented and tested.
It is very easy for us to track contributions to all of our open source projects. All of the projects are setup with a service hook to notify our company’s “Open Source” chat room when events happen like code is committed or a pull request is opened or an issue is filed. Every week I create a new “shell” for the “Game Face” blog post after the last one is published. I set it to be published automatically at 9 AM on the following Friday. As contributions come in to our open source projects, next week’s blog post is updated.
I’m not sure if we’ll open source more projects than we did in 2012. 33 is a fair number of projects to have open sourced. We obviously want quality over quantity. I’m always pushing to see if there’s anything we can open source. One of the ideas being tossed around as a way to expand our open source efforts would be to hold a weekly “Office Hours” session where a few engineers hop onto IRC or a Google “hangout” for an hour or so and field questions on our projects.
FIN
We are happy to contribute back in any way we can to open source software, whether it be our own projects or the projects we use on a daily basis. Again, if your company does anything with open source, I’d love to know about it!