Building software faster with the power of open source

Chris Phang
CodeThink

Friday 31 January 2020
14:15 - 15:15
Earl Mountbatten Building, room 1.70

Slides available here

Abstract

Open source software, where code is freely available for modification and redistribution, is a powerful method for producing high-quality software. In the area of build-engineering, where developers work to build and deploy complex software, there are a plethora of open-source tools. Why? Building software at scale is a hard problem. In 2015, the number of lines of code that spans Google's web services was estimated at 2 billion lines of code. This is in a single repository, with 25,000 active developers. What do you do to manage this complexity? How do you approach trying to build software faster at this scale?

We present an overview of what open source software is and why it is important. As an example, we describe Codethink's open source efforts around the REAPI (remote execution API) which is an open source API for building binaries in a remote system. Finally, we'll discuss future directions, including how anyone can get involved in our open source projects!

Host: Hans-Wolfgang Loidl