Software Engineering Daily

Most technology companies rely on open source software projects. But open source software projects are often maintained by a group of people that is not affiliated with any particular company. When an open source project develops too much technical debt, it can become a tragedy of the commons. Who is responsible for maintaining these open source projects?

This is the motivation for open source bounties. Companies and individuals who rely on open source create bounties, which are financial incentives for developers to solve problems within the open source project.

Kevin Owocki is the creator of Gitcoin, a platform for open source bounties that is mediated by an Ethereum smart contract. Kevin joins the show to discuss his experience building Gitcoin–as well as some of the problems with the blockchain space, such as rampant ICOs. Gitcoin is NOT a cryptocurrency or token itself–it is a platform for open source software to be built more efficiently. Kevin was an awesome guest and you will enjoy the conversation.

Gitcoin is a nice example of a real-world Ethereum use case–it uses Ethereum for escrow: if I post a $25 bounty for someone to fix a bug in my open source project, I will lock up ether in a smart contract. When the bug is fixed, the programmer who fixed it will submit a pull request on Github, and I will release the ether from the smart contract to pay them.

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Of course–you can also send me an email at any time, jeff@softwaredaily.com. And in the meantime, if you are completely sick of cryptocurrencies, check out our back catalog of episodes at softwaredaily.com, or by downloading our Software Engineering Daily apps, which have all of our episodes including our Greatest Hits, which is a curated set of the most popular shows. The apps will soon have offline downloads and bookmarking.

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Triplebyte is a company that connects engineers with top tech companies. We’re running an experiment and our hypothesis is that Software Engineering Daily listeners will do well above average on the quiz. Go to triplebyte.com/sedaily and take the multiple-choice quiz, and in a few episodes we’ll share some stats about how you all did. Try it yourself at triplebyte.com/sedaily.

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to making your app “realtime.” PubNub makes it simple, enabling you to build immersive and interactive experiences on the web, on mobile phones, embedded into hardware, and any other device connected to the Internet. With powerful APIs, and a robust global infrastructure, you can stream geolocation data, send chat messages, turn on your sprinklers, or rock your baby’s crib when they start crying (PubNub literally powers IoT cribs). 70 SDKs for web, mobile, IoT, and more means you can start streaming data in realtime without a ton of compatibility headaches, and no need to build your own SDKs from scratch. Go to PubNub.com/sedaily to get started. They offer a generous sandbox tier that’s free forever (until your app takes off).

Azure Container Service simplifies the deployment, management and operations of Kubernetes. You can continue to work with the tools you already know, such as Helm, and move applications to any Kubernetes deployment. Integrate with your choice of container registry, including Azure Container Registry. Also, quickly and efficiently scale to maximize your resource utilization without having to take your applications offline. Isolate your application from infrastructure failures and transparently scale the underlying infrastructure to meet growing demands—all while increasing the security, reliability, and availability of critical business workloads with Azure. Check out the Azure Container Service at aka.ms/sedaily.

The TEALs program is looking for engineers from across the country to volunteer to teach computer science in high schools. Work with a computer science teacher in the classroom to bring development concepts to life through teamwork and determination. If you’d like to learn more about the Microsoft’s TEALs program or submit your volunteer application, go to tealsk12.org/sedaily.