People often wonder about what kind of software projects a company could or should open source. This is often considered a dangerous decision for a company, due to the risk of revealing inventions and losing strategic position against competitors.

The codebases of the most companies are made of business logic dominated repositories and tools/utilities built around them. Assuming that your company has a valuable business logic inventory, you should probably keep that code to yourself. On the other hand, side tools and libraries you have written are engineered with valuable man-hours. Since these are not the most critical parts and don’t have serious deadlines, your hackers were able to illustrate engineering beyond their comfort zone and were able to use their full imagination and came up with creative stuff –which you can open source.

Most of the time, with the tools and utilities you created, chances are high that you will need them again; maybe at another team, maybe at your next company or next job. At this point you should find ways to open source these tools and libraries developed in your company.

You will see that other people in tech companies (mostly not your competitors) will be delighted with your efforts in open source and will contribute back. They will find bugs for you, make it better and faster and even better and they will become good candidates if you are looking for hackers to hire.

By open sourcing your software, you will be coding at a much better level and quality to avoid the public eye’s bad criticism and this will make you a better engineer who creates maintainable and usable software. You will build your code on good abstractions, honor best practices, write better documentation (which is a good habit that every corporate developer should gain), and better tests.

Some examples of open sourced software from a variety of companies to convince you:

• Linguist by GitHub: a library to detect language of source files and binaries
• Guava by Google: extended utilities and functionalities library for Java
• MoSQL by Stripe: MongoDB to PostgreSQL streaming replication library
• PonyDebugger by Square: Native iOS debugging bridge on Chrome Developer Tools
• Rogue by Foursquare: Type-safe Scala DSL for MongoDB in Lift framework
• Brackets by Adobe: Web-based code editor for web
• Awesome projects by Twitter: Finagle, Bower, Zipkin etc.

One thing you should remember is that for most of the time, it is not the companies who are giving away source code, but it is the individual efforts that make it happen. They come up with these ideas and bravely debate against their managers and internal pressure to make a contribution to the public domain.

In the worst case, nobody will use your open source project, but GitHub presence of company will still look cool and you will be able to reuse code from your old company if you leave someday.

You should go now, find the reusable parts of your software, open source it (at least internally in your company), write tests, prepare human-friendly documentation, convince your managers and publish it.

Thanks to Burcu Dogan and Can Duruk for reviewing and editing this article.

Lately, I’ve been reading Joshua Becker’s book Simplify about minimalist lifestyle. It’s a very short book, but hey, it has to be, this is minimalism!

This is an inspiring book about removing clutter and stuff you don’t actually need from your life and enjoy your life –not the things. Here are my key takeaways from the book:

• Which you hold, holds you. Things you own actually begin to own you after some time. You clean them, organize them, buy them, sell them etc. More you own, the more time they rob from your lives.
• “There are things more you should value more than possessions –God, family, relationships, character etc.”
• Give things away or sell them if you are not really using. You won’t lose that much.
• Spend money on life experiences than possessions.

Read more →

iTunes has a nice public music search API which offers 30-second previews and detailed information about music albums and tracks. However I could not play these previews on Android or Chrome browser —but it was playing perfectly in iOS apps and OS X Safari browser. (See sample audio here.) With the help of a little bit of packet capturing I found out the reason why iTunes previews cannot be played outside of iOS and OS X. Read more →

Yaay! Happy birthday pal. It all started with a handmade blog written in classic ASP.

This weekend I decided to practice my iOS skills with a simple utility app. The TV satellite receiver box in our home Vu+ Duo runs on Linux and it has an API to simulate remote control, change channels, set volume, list channels etc. After connecting to the device over WiFi local area network, it can be used to “zap” channels instantly or controlling device with a virtual remote. So I put these down in an app and submitted to App Store today for free. Read more →

Some exciting news to share today! October 1st will be my first day at Microsoft Windows Azure. This is going to be my first full-time job. I am joining the same team which I had an internship last year. My position is software development engineer in test and my team produces end-to-end automated testing systems for Azure cloud services. I’ll be moving to Redmond, WA (where Microsoft headquarters is located) in Seattle area. Read more →

iPhone 5 is announced today with a bigger 4-inch screen resolution today. It corresponds to 1136 x 640 px. Compared to old 960 x 640 px resolution, the new screen is 176 px wider. Apple announced that old applications in the App Store will still run at their original (old) size and will be centered on the screen. That means there will be 88 px empty (black) spaces at the end and at the bottom. Read more →

Many people in startups these days trying to be “the next” Instagram, Pinterest, Path, Foursquare or whatever. The main point many people (including me) miss is that making products for masses is not for three-kids-with-zero-money job. You literally need strong connections with online press and a team to gain a traction and growth –and of course several millions of dollars. Think about Foursquare, before it came out, people did not need to publish their locations. Read more →

Here’s how I keep my inbox 0 unread everyday. Unsubscribe from all newsletters. They are probably just information load for you. If you are not a serious Groupon user, just opt-out. You’ll check that out when you seriously need information. Unsubscribe from email notifications. You use Facebook, Twitter or Github, Quora every day. You are already going to see who followed you on Twitter or mentioned you on Facebook when you log in. Read more →

As Jason Fried (CEO, 37signals) puts it down: It seems like in a lot of companies we are reaching “peak people”. There’s a shortage of talent out there, and if there’s a shortage of resources, you want to conserve those resources. Although there are quite a number of programmers, designers, product guys are around (and many others are at the other end of the world, working from their homes, like 37signals does) there is a shortage of talented people. Read more →