Open Source

I've been contributing to open source for 25 years. I maintained packages in Debian, created the awesome window manager, contributed to GNU Emacs, built telemetry infrastructure at OpenStack, and created the Gnocchi time series database. This page collects the best posts from that journey.

Open Source Philosophy

What open source means, how it's changing, and why the old social contract is breaking down in the age of AI.

Feb 2026 Open Source Is Getting Used to Death
Oct 2016 Running an open source and upstream oriented team in agile mode
Jun 2016 The bad practice in FOSS projects management

OpenStack

Six years building Ceilometer and the telemetry platform — from early distributed systems work to a two-part retrospective on what went right and wrong.

Apr 2018 Lessons from OpenStack Telemetry: Deflation
Apr 2018 Lessons from OpenStack Telemetry: Incubation
Mar 2016 The OpenStack Schizophrenia
May 2013 Rant about Github pull-request workflow implementation
Apr 2012 OpenStack Swift eventual consistency analysis & bottlenecks

Gnocchi

Building a time series database from scratch — the origin story, the Carbonara storage engine, benchmarks, independence from OpenStack, and late-stage optimizations.

Mar 2018 Gnocchi engine optimization
Aug 2017 Gnocchi or Prometheus?
May 2017 Gnocchi independence
Feb 2016 Timeseries storage and data compression
Oct 2015 Benchmarking Gnocchi for fun & profit
Aug 2014 OpenStack Ceilometer and the Gnocchi experiment

Emacs

From switching to Emacs to contributing to its core — rainbow-mode, Google Maps inside a text editor, and OAuth for Elisp.

Sep 2011 OAuth 2.0 for Emacs
Jun 2010 M-x google-maps
Jun 2010 Announcing rainbow-mode
Jun 2010 Desktop notification support for Emacs
May 2010 Entering the Emacs world

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