A.J. Brown is a principal engineer, Spring Boot enthusiast, and advocate for open source software.

As part of our ongoing series for World Open Source Day, we had a conversation with A.J. about his journey in open source software development so far.

Let’s dive into his story where he talks about observability, Netflix engineering, and open source versus proprietary code.

What do you think is the most important aspect of open source?

The most important aspect of open source is the value that the world gets out of it. 

What I mean by that is, most of the applications on your phone, on your computer, everything we use every single day are comprised largely of open source. In modern application development, there are very few applications that are mostly proprietary code. If you consider all the execution paths in an application, most of them probably go through something open source. The reason for that is that it helps developers build software faster, because they don’t have to think about the concerns that other people have already thought of for them. It’s almost like you don’t have to understand how square roots in math work — you just have to know they exist and when to use them. Open source software is kind of the same way.

The other part is it reduces the amount of knowledge developers need to have on something in order to effectively use it. As an example, I use AI/ML tools every day. I have no clue how that works, but if I can pull in a library to do it for me, I can now leverage that thing that someone else spent a lot of time, energy, and research doing. 

It’s a boon of generalizing knowledge and getting rid (Read more...)