Hayden Barnes:

I was also thinking a lot, and I still do to this day, a lot about open source sustainability, alternative open source funding models. And I said, when I was growing up, you either ordered Linux CDs from the back of Computer Shopper or you know, you actually bought them, you paid for them. And we've kind of gotten away from the idea of paying for Linux, but this is actually supports open source developers. So let's take our bespoke distro and put it on the Microsoft Store and just ask 10 bucks for it and say, hey, we did this work. We've got this cool distro for you to get started with that's just kind of just works out of the box and we put it together, put it on the store and I didn't think much of it. I figured a couple hundred people might give it a try and within a few months we had thousands of downloads. Let me be your hero.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

You're listening to the Everyday Heroes podcast brought to you by Hero Devs. Welcome back to another episode of Everyday Heroes, a show where we showcase the unsung heroes of the web. That's right. We sit down with the backbone of the open web, open source maintainers, contributors and organizers. My name's Hayden Baillio and I'm here with my co host, Wendy Hurst. Wendy, how you feeling today?

‍

Wendy Hurst:

So good, so good. I was cleaning out my desk because that's what you do sometimes.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

Oh yeah.

‍

Wendy Hurst:

And I found something fun. It's a rubber duck.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

A rubber ducky?

‍

Wendy Hurst:

It's just a rubber duck. I kept it as mine after a conference. It's something that we used to hand out at conferences. He's got the little Hero Devs Cody on the tummy. But anyway, my little buddy, I keep him on my desk. Have you ever heard of the concept of rubber ducking in the developer world? Yeah, I didn't hear about it until I worked here. The first time I heard it, I looked it up because I didn't want to get in trouble with HR or whatever. Like rubber ducking.

‍

Wendy Hurst:

I wasn't sure what that meant, but the concept of the rubber duck in like the engineering world is kind of in the vein of debugging, right? You want to debug some code, you talk to a rubber duck or inanimate object, line by line. And it helps you kind of identify problems because essentially you're solving your own problem, but by talking out loud to somebody or something. Sometimes it just makes it easier for you. I'm not an engineer, but I still use it all the time. I'M a project manager and I also manage a bunch of other things and just it's helpful when I'm preparing a presentation or anything else that is in front of other people to talk to. This rubber duck.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

I remember those rubber ducks. We had several suitcases full of those rubber ducks, didn't we? For a long time?

‍

Wendy Hurst:

So many.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

Yeah, we had so many. And we bring them just so everybody knows who's listening or watching. We bring them to get rid of them at conferences because we literally had hundreds of them. And Wendy loves to throw things across the table to people she likes to, like, surprise them with swag. So if you ever come to a conference and you and you see hero devs there and me and Wendy are there, just know something might get thrown at you. So get your hands ready. But that's good. You know, I like to clean my desk whenever I have to do something really important.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

Wendy, I like to clean my desk because obviously that's my procrastination. That's my procrastination mode. But we should actually get out of host talk here and do a little bit of introduction to our guest. So our guest today, I have to say his name is Top. Wendy. I think that's what the kids say now, right? Top.

‍

Wendy Hurst:

Sure, sure.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

Okay. I knew it. I knew it. Anyways, back on track. Our guest today is a published author. He's the only person we've had on the show so far that has passed the bar. And he made his transition from law into the tech world and has led open source efforts at companies like Hewlett Packard and now at Hero Devs. And without any more gilding the lily here, welcome Hayden Barnes.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

Thanks for joining us.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

Thanks so much for having me, Wendy and Hayden.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

I know, I know. Yeah. Hero Devs had to go and not only hire another Hayden, but also hire another Hayden with the last name that starts with B. Gotta love it. But no, every Hayden's special and unique and we're all incredible. At least that's what my mom told me. Hayden, we're going to start. We kind of start the podcast off with a little game at a game that me and Wendy made up called Fork, Star or Deprecate.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

Wendy, take it away.

‍

Wendy Hurst:

Yeah, yeah, got you. Okay, so in this game, I'm going to say something, anything from an open source tool or programming language or ridiculous concept in tech that we made up and you get to decide whether to fork it, which would be to improve it, to star it, leave it alone, or deprecate it, retire it entirely. Are you ready for the game.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

Yeah.

‍

Wendy Hurst:

Okay, Here we go. PowerShell Core Star. C sharp.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

Star.

‍

Wendy Hurst:

Hackathons fork. Windows subsystem for Linux, WSL adoption and dev workflows.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

Star on awesome WSL my GitHub repo. Yeah, there you go.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

Okay.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

Okay.

‍

Wendy Hurst:

Microsoft Azure fork. I hope I'm pronouncing it correctly.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

Yes.

‍

Wendy Hurst:

Next one. Command line interfaces.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

What kind of interfaces?

‍

Wendy Hurst:

Command line interfaces.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

Oh, star.

‍

Wendy Hurst:

Developer burnout awareness.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

Oh, fork. Big time.

‍

Wendy Hurst:

Okay. Classic asp. Classic Only deprecate. Okay. An AI tool that rewrites your code in Shakespearean English.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

Star. Absolutely. Star. I mean natural language coding is what's next. And then after that it's Shakespearean natural language coding.

‍

Wendy Hurst:

It is. I don't know where else we would go from here. And then finally a programming language where all keywords are emojis.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

Star. Yes. Scene.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

Nice. Thanks for playing. It's just like a little way that we like to get warmed up. Those are good. Those are good this time, Wendy. I like that. Yeah. Shakespearean English is the natural next step after natural language, right? Because you just.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

It's cycles. Right? The world is just cycles and we're eventually just going to get back to saying things like nonce and things like that. So I can't wait to. To get to that point, games aside, podcast is to get to know Hayden Barnes a little bit more and his journey. So Hayden, I guess my first initial question is, dude, what pulled you out of law into tech?

‍

Hayden Barnes:

So I've actually been a tinkerer, a hobbyist, open source enthusiast for many, many years. I think my first Linux distro was Red Hat 5 in 98 or 99 and that was really awesome. You know, it came with a book back then that you had to read and I installed it on my first machine and had to build my kernel to get the driver support I needed. So that was my first experience with Linux. But oddly enough, I never really did well in math or traditional computer science courses in high school and college. So I sort of wrote it off as a career path. I was mostly a self taught programmer. I was active in some open source communities, certainly in things like chat and forums and things like that.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

Ended up in law school, becoming an attorney, opening my own practice eventually, and I was writing applications to assist my law practice. For example, our county judicial system used an old IBM mainframe and you used to have to log in with this ancient Java applet and I'm like, oh, this is just a S390 terminal. I can write a front end to this. So I threw together a Front end and flask and a little bit of Python and all of a sudden had a modern web interface to check the status of my cases and monitor incoming cases and things like that. So I was always tinkering, learning, following trends and then came along. So it's a funny detour. I'm a huge command line fan, big UNIX nerd. I've got my Unix poster back there.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

Classic HP Unix UX and Apple introduced the new MacBook with the butterfly keyboard. And believe it or not, this may have changed the trajectory of my career because I could not stand the butterfly keyboard. And a couple folks recommended go check out the ThinkPad. So I gave the ThinkPad a try. Love the keyboard, but I still needed to be able to run things like Office. But I wanted access to a nix terminal. So I checked out this new thing called WSL Windows Hostess for Linux. And just based on my background and tinkering and fascination with virtualization was instantly hooked.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

And things kind of snowballed from there.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

I think I have the title for this episode by the way. The Apple Butterfly Keyboard Changed my life. So at this point though, you're still practicing law and making applications for, for like your law office that you run, right? Let's move forward. I want to know like a little bit more like when that transition happened and when you became, I think it was part of water. I'm gonna let you tell the story.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

Sure. So I started hacking on WSL and started connecting with other hackers doing interesting things on WSL. And there was a small growing community around WSL. This was relatively early days. WSL1 to get WSL1 to work often required some hacks, some package rebuilds and things like that. And everyone was working on these interesting things. And basically I got together with a few of my friends from that WSL community and I said what if we took all of these cool hacks that everyone is working on and combined it into a bespoke Linux distro derivative that had it all out of the box. And I was also thinking a lot, and I still do to this day, a lot about open source sustainability, alternative open source funding models.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

And I said when I was growing up, you either ordered Linux CDs from the back of computer shopper or you actually bought them, you paid for them. And we've kind of gotten away from the idea of paying for Linux, but this actually supports open source developers. So let's take our bespoke distro and, and put it on the Microsoft Store and just ask 10 bucks for it and Say, hey, we did this work. We've got this cool distro for you to get started with that's just kind of just works out of the box. And we put it together, put it on the store and I didn't think much of it. I figured a couple hundred people might give it a try. And within a few months we had thousands of downloads. Microsoft announced their new Windows terminal in a really cool sizzle reel and included us in the little dropdown of the distro options.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

And I'm like, oh, wow. And yeah, I was invited to speak at Microsoft Build, the Microsoft Developers Conference. And it came to a point where I was kind of running a law practice by day and a small WSL startup consultancy firm by night. And we started attracting enterprise interest. We branched into offering an official Fedora remix for wsl. We had an enterprise build and later WSL management tools. They're still around like Raft, well maintained, get still get new features. And that kind of became my full time job.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

I kind of stopped taking new clients and doubled down on what we called it was Penguin, Penguin with a W, since it was Linux on Windows and kind of galvanized this WSL community and had this distro and things went from there. So eventually I was approached by Canonical, you know, the creators of Ubuntu. And a couple of us had the opportunity to make the leap from the project over to Canonical and lead Ubuntu on WSL efforts. A couple engineers stayed behind. I did believe in maintaining sustainability of that project, so I handed off the BDFL role to one of the engineers who stayed behind. And that project is still very active. And I took over for Ubuntu on WSL at Canonical.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

Wow, okay, that's a very cool transition. It's also cool to hear that like Penguin is still going strong. That's really cool. I kind of wonder like, because open source is kind of like that oftentimes I feel like I've been around a lot of business and a lot of startup, but open source can feel like you helped create something, Hayden, and now it's still living. It's like at this point it will be part of your legacy potentially. What does it feel to look at it still active and be like, yeah, that was a big part of find like founding that and making that happen. What kind of feelings does that even give someone?

‍

Hayden Barnes:

It's incredibly fulfilling. And the engineer who took over lead, Carlos, is amazing. I still help out when I can. And that continues to exist. And that that was the kind of sustainability I was thinking a lot about at the time, which was, we all understand that enterprise is a major driver of open source sustainability, particularly large projects. But I do think we needed a mindset where pro users get back to the idea of paying a little for the open source software that they use. Things like GitHub sponsorships is another option. Upgrades to show your support are another.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

Projects like Nano zip have a sponsorship edition, another alternative. But I like the idea of that social contract between a pro user and what's a large but generally niche tool that's of high value to those pro users and those pro users contributing to sustaining that in the long term. And that way those pro users not only get support and fund the sustainability of the project they're relying on, but it forms like a social contract that exists between those pro users and the engineers building the tool. And I think that's something that's really special and oftentimes kind of just goes missing when you just drop something in a requirements txt. You don't have that relationship necessarily with that developer. And at least in some spaces there's room to have that relationship between pro users, devs and the creators of the.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

Tools that they use, 100% on all that. I like the social contract that you're talking about because, I mean, if I just look at it from a general feeling of like, hey, how much closer and more connected do you feel when your company rewards you for your good work, when they actually give you the raise, when they offer you more money or promotion? It's like. And so it works both ways. It's like, I mean, we obviously here at Hero Devs, which I didn't want to plug too much, but like, obviously here at Herodesk we want to push the web forward and we want to help, you know, sustain and fund those projects that are pushing the web forward. And it's really cool because it does. I think my short time here at Herodes already, it's been a big tenant of what we do. And I've seen the relationships, the relationships happen and become so much stronger when you get to write that first check and you get, you get to look at that person and they know that they can now spend more time on that and less time on having to figure out how they're just going to pay their bills While also working 5 to 9 on their passion project, right. And wearing themselves down.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

It's a really quite a cool feeling. All right, that's great. And also that leads me to a very easy transition here to talk a little bit about the company that all three of us work for. So right now I'm going to tell you a little bit about HeroDevs. Everyday Heroes is brought to you by HeroDevs. HeroDevs offers secure drop in replacements for for your end of life open source software through our never ending support product line. You get to stay compliant with the likes of SOC2 and HIPAA and FedRamp and all the other acronyms and regulatory bodies you can think of. All while also getting real vulnerability remediation.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

You don't have to choose between a new feature and security. And with over 800 clients, you can be confident that your unsupported open source is in good hands. So if you need us, we're here. And if you don't, well, that probably means you've migrated to the newest version. So huzzah. Either way. Visit herodeads.com to learn more. Now back to your regular scheduled programming.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

Peace.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

Okay, Hayden, it's time for our next game of the show called Not My Job.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

Okay.

‍

Wendy Hurst:

We learned a lot about what you know and a lot about what you do. And now we're gonna ask you three questions that have nothing to do with your job at all and everything to do with with what you know about the history of kitchen gadgets. Are you ready?

‍

Hayden Barnes:

All right. Classic.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

All right, you know where Wendy's going with this too. Trust me.

‍

Wendy Hurst:

Okay, question number one. The first electric coaster was introduced in the early 1900s. What was its major flaw? A it caught fire if left plugged in B, it toasted only one side of the bread at a time, or C, it required cranking by hand while plugged in b. B, it toasted only one side of the bread at a time. How did you know that?

‍

Hayden Barnes:

He's a genius.

‍

Wendy Hurst:

Lucky guess.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

I thought we were. This was supposed to be about not his expertise, Wendy. Geez.

‍

Wendy Hurst:

I looked at him and I was like, he's a busy guy. He probably doesn't cook very much.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

Well, is that true though? Do you cook?

‍

Hayden Barnes:

Not often.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

Okay, good. Yeah. You did it right. Yeah, there you go.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

I'm an omad guy. One meal a day.

‍

Wendy Hurst:

Okay.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

One meal a day. All right. I like it. That's very sumo of you.

‍

Wendy Hurst:

Question number two. This is very serious. The iconic KitchenAid stand mixer was first sold in 1919. What inspired its design? A, a submarine's mixing mechanism, B a ship's propeller or C, a baker's hat? A, a, a submarine's mixing mechanism. How did you know that?

‍

Hayden Barnes:

This is how I passed the bar exam. I'm just really good at guessing.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

Just like pro guesser. You thought you could fool me? I'm just. I'm actually just an expert at guessing. You said a submarine's mixing mechanism.

‍

Wendy Hurst:

Mechanism.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

What are they even referring to? Is that. That's not a propeller. It's like just inside of a submarine. Wow. Okay. Insane. All right.

‍

Wendy Hurst:

I didn't Google it. I haven't independently verified these answers, so. Okay, question number three. What does the spork, the famous spoon fork hybrid, owe its origins to? A, a medieval eating utensil used by Knights? B, a 19th century patent by a doctor in Rhode Island. Or C, A, a marketing gimmick by fast food chains in the 1970s? B, B, 19th century patent by a doctor in Rhode Island.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

Oh my gosh. I would have legit went with number three on that one. I thought, clearly the spork would have been invented by some ridiculous fake campaign that ended up becoming a real thing, but I do think it's one of the most. It should be used more, honestly, if I'm being honest with you, sports should be used more.

‍

Wendy Hurst:

The universal tool for universal things.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

You just put like a socket on the other side and you basically have any tool that you need. Well, thanks for playing, Hayden.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

I appreciate it. Yeah.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

Yo, we have fun here. We have fun here. Okay, we're getting back in and obviously you're an expert guesser and I'm going to guess at where we left off, but I think it was somewhere around you officially joining the team at Canonical, Correct. To lead some of their Ubuntu WSL stuff. So let's start there and let's see what are the rest of. Let's go from there up to. Up to this point in time.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

Yeah. So while at Canonical, working on Ubuntu, I joined as a developer advocate and I got to learn community advocacy from the best. Martin Wimpress. Wimpy. Alan Pope, known as Popey, well known in the Linux community. Got to learn the tricks of the trade there. Eventually promoted to engineering manager on Ubuntu on wsl, which was cool. Was technically part of the desktop team.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

Got to be a part of the entire Ubuntu desktop release process. Got involved in Snaps and other aspects of the Ubuntu community. It was then that I started noticing a lot of use of WSL for cloud native development, Kubernetes using Canonical's MicroK8's distribution of Kubernetes and got interested in where that was going. And I have at this point, this kind of unique cross platform experience with Windows and Linux and I kind of wanted to get into the cloud native space. So after a few years I kind of started keeping an eye out for opportunities and I had an opportunity to transition to Rancher, which since been acquired by suse and take my engineering management skills and lead up the Windows containers aspect of Rancher Kubernetes distribution. So I was able to take my Linux on Windows skills and apply them to running Windows containers on Windows on Linux VMs and get involved in the Kubernetes ecosystem and learn more there. Learn more. A little bit of go get involved in kind of those low level Kubernetes service meshes and things like that.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

So that was really interesting. Ended up also leading the internal DevOps team, working to build the Rancher documentation team and had a blast there. But eventually I kind of wanted to get back to more of the community aspect that was very strong in what had built up around Penguin and the WSL community, certainly around Ubuntu. And this is funny, it was a couple years ago now, but I was kind of looking around and I'm like, I think this AI thing is about, about to be a thing. And I had the opportunity to lead up community at a project called Determined AI, which was a open source mlops platform later acquired by HPE Hewlett Packard Enterprise that scaled massive machine learning projects from a single workstation to HP's Craze supercomputers and build a team there and then dive headfirst into ML. And that was super exciting. And through all of this I continued to be involved in the WSL community and then it kind of branched out from there where I became more involved in the broader kind of open source ecosystem that is growing around Microsoft as part of their pivot with Azure, but increasingly on Linux and Windows as well. We worked with Microsoft at Canonical, we clearly collaborated with Microsoft on Windows containers at Windows Rancher.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

And it was really interesting being a partner with Microsoft and a community leader in this ecosystem as part of this transition from the old Microsoft to the new Microsoft. And you know, occasionally I get accused of being, you know, a Microsoft shill or an apologist. But it's funny because I've seen, because of my work on Ubuntu and in the Linux community, I'm seen by many folks there as kind of the Microsoft guy. And then within the Microsoft ecosystem, I'm often seen as kind of the Linux guy. And I have this interesting kind of ambassador role that I take very seriously because I really do embrace both sets of technologies and use them daily and believe in open source, improving all ecosystems, all operating systems and leveraging the best of both and kind of cross pollinating operating systems and ecosystems with the best tools. So the backdrop of that, from Canonical to Rancher to Determine and now to Herobevs, has been working as a Microsoft partner and a Microsoft MVP in that ecosystem and be able to play in that ecosystem and build relationships and friendships with other community members and folks at Microsoft. And it's been a lot of fun.

‍

Wendy Hurst:

What advice would you give to people in the open source world right now who are out there kind of like you? They're creating their own stuff and they're excited that people are adopting their things, but it's also like their side hobby. There's kind of a stigma about accepting payment for something like that in the open source world.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

There's some interesting and somewhat negative beliefs in open source that get perpetuated that. I mean some are just outright toxic, some are outdated and some I think hold open source back. I think among a certain group of people the idea that you get paid for doing open source or free software as a negative is detrimental. I mean, I don't think it has to be everyone's job. I certainly gain a lot of personal satisfaction from building and maintaining my own open source projects. I'm the boss, I'm the project manager and I set the release cadence. But I do think going back to it, if you're developing a tool that's in use is widely depended upon, then I think you should expect compensation. And bridging that gap can be challenging.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

Seeking donations on like npm or GitHub sponsors, or projects like Tide Lift, or just getting hired by an open source company that will pay you to do that and other work I think are all viable options. Certainly when I am looking at hiring engineering candidates, I'm not necessarily looking for them to have built and maintained their own long term open source projects. But contributions to open source projects are always something I look for as a hiring manager at open source companies. Just kind of familiarity with how open source works in generally is a huge positive for landing a job in open source. There's some other, I think toxic beliefs that stick around unfortunately, but increasingly on the fringe things. Microsoft is the enemy. I'm a big proponent of use what you like. If you like macOS, if you like using the Linux desktop, use it.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

You don't have to reply to my tweet about WSL and being like use real Linux, it's real Linux. It's just another way to use it. We can disfis with the gatekeeping and the idea that there's one right way to do things, there's many different ways to engage in open source. Use what makes you happy and productive and embrace change. I mean, part of Open source and the free software generally is that, you know, we want to, we share code because we want to drive innovation. And when companies do things that pivot towards open source and embrace free software, we can't get hung up on things that happened 25 years ago. One thing I point out is that there are now entire sets of engineers, and now senior engineers, even managers at Microsoft who have only ever worked on open source software. It's just the reality of it.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

And not to just be that Microsoft apologist or thing, but use what you want, use what works for you. Be open to companies and organizations changing. Be strong beliefs, but loosely held. Be open to changing your mind as new information comes in. And that applies to how you think about what open source and free software should be. And in order to keep open source sustainable, developers need to be paid. And the good news is we're talking about it more now and there's more and more ways to get them paid and there's not one solution, but there's going to be a lot and we need to embrace all possible options there.

‍

Wendy Hurst:

That is a fantastic answer to a question I did not even know how to ask.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

I think to build on it, it's like there is with a lot of things that I've been involved in in my life, whether it's hobbies or whatever. There's oftentimes this, especially with social media the way that it is, there's this almost unavoidable problem of getting into an echo chamber. Hayden like when you have strong feelings about somebody doing something, you tend to find the people that are going to give you confirmation bias around that. So like you seem to have been able to spread out your career. You had, you didn't come straight from, you know, you didn't start your career in technology. You gradually moved into technology and then straight into open source and then it seems like you did some other stuff, but then back into this community role. And then now at Herobevs you're really in this more of a community role also leading a lot of our. Net efforts.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

Do you think that advice to a younger generation of developers that you might have, that might be stuck in the echo chamber of oh, well, you should only learn react or oh, you should only learn this or this is the best one, what are your thoughts around that?

‍

Hayden Barnes:

I mean in terms of choosing a platform or an ecosystem. I mean there's so many alternatives and choices today and I think narrowing yourself to one limits you long term. Now developing a strong competency in one can certainly be advantageous career wise. But even if you're a full time. NET developer, watching the development of GO and Rust and other up and coming programming languages and doing some projects in those are going to make you a better C or F or vb. NET developer. You're going to learn things. So try everything, probably get good at a few things, but then keep trying other things as they come along and be open to that because it's going to help build your core competency and improve your development in your day to day.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

I hope that there is a junior dev listening that they grab that nugget and they take that forward. I want to move forward to what you're doing now and the role you're filling at Herodes. What are you doing at Herobevs nowadays.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

As part of this kind of open source transformation, this big pivot at Microsoft? Microsoft open sourced.net which is their primary application development platform, it's incredibly flexible. It allows you to build everything from web apps to desktop apps to terminal apps. It allows you to build for Linux, Windows, macOS, Android. I built. Net apps for Haiku, the successor to be OS. I mean it supports FreeBSD, Solaris. It's cool. And after kind of getting comfortable in PowerShell, C didn't seem that difficult.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

Like there's some commonalities there. Even though I was initially kind of admittedly resistant to like C. Go is the new thing, Rust is the new thing. But I found C to be very comfortable and have been developing with it in the. Net ecosystem for a while. But Microsoft open. Sourced. Net as part of this transformation and eventually net 5.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

They released a few open source versions with their own versions. But then Net5 was the next big release of. Net and the proprietary and the open source versions merged. So there's still a proprietary early version that is still out there. But Every version since 5 has been fully open source and 6 was the most recent LTS. It recently went end of life. 8 is the next one. 9 was just released.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

A lot of cool enhancements there. But here devs we recognize that there are a lot of enterprises and. NET dev shops supporting enterprises and government agencies who feel somewhat limited by the 3 year LTS support window of those even number versions of.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

Net.

‍

Hayden Barnes:

So I joined Herodevs to lead up an initiative to extend the life of those LTS versions. By taking the upstream open source versions when the LTSS reach official end of life for Microsoft and then give it that herodev treatment which is continued security support, continued maintenance and help extend not only enterprise applications that were built and targeted to those LTS versions, but what I feel strongly about is helping enterprises migrate from legacy.net but the four.net X series and get them into modern. Net with all of its advantages and performance improvements, but then give them that extra window that they need beyond three years in many cases to migrate, in many cases dozens or even hundreds of applications in very large Fortune 100 companies and give them that flexibility. So I see it both as enabling continued support for apps on.net 6, but also eventually opening the window for migrating from legacy proprietary. NET to future versions of modern open source. Net and then giving that extra flexibility they need beyond that three years to be comfortable and plan for those often large scale migrations across tens of thousands of workstations or IoT devices or websites.

‍

Hayden Baillio:

Yeah, I can't even imagine just the thought of having to basically switch every three years. It seems like such a monumental task to do for some companies where three years still sounds like such a short time frame and you're like, this is going to take a year on its own, maybe more. And then it's like now we have two years until the next time that we have to do it right. But no, I'm glad you're. I mean, I think we're all glad you're here. We're really excited to support the. NET community like that. I got to bring it up like published author, wrote a book, published it in 2021.

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Hayden Baillio:

What was the process like of writing a book? When did you dive into that? I saw that it was in 2021. So I do wonder if this was like a 2020 Covid project where you were like, I'm cooped up. I might as well write this book. We'd love a little background. You can plug your book too.

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Hayden Barnes:

To everybody listening pro WSL from Apress so I was tricked into doing it by another author who said, oh, just write a book. It's easy, it just takes a few months. And that was a lot of fun. Collaborated with a lot of cool folks from the WSL community on that. Nuno, Lucy and others. I took a swing at a book a couple years later. Didn't quite come together as I'd hoped. I published some of the chapters as blog posts.

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Hayden Barnes:

I do have another one in the works. My editor is probably emailed me already today asking me to sign off on the next chapter. The first one is definitely a tech book. I'm excited about my new book, though, because it's going to be more of a little bit more of a history and journalistic book in this space. But stay tuned.

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Hayden Baillio:

I will. That is exciting. That's a big accomplishment regardless, you know, is to just actually move through a full book and publish it. So we'll link your current book, by the way, in the show notes, I think. But I think that's. I mean, this has been amazing so far. I'd like to just wrap it up like kind of our final game of the day. Hayden, we're going to play Lightning Fill in the blank.

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Hayden Baillio:

Wendy, take it away.

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Wendy Hurst:

Lightning, Fill in the blank. In this game, you have 60 seconds to answer as many questions as you can. The more questions you answer, the more bragging rights you get to take home. Are you ready?

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Hayden Barnes:

Yes.

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Hayden Baillio:

60 seconds. Okay. Do I need to get a stopwatch out?

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Wendy Hurst:

Yes.

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Hayden Baillio:

Okay.

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Wendy Hurst:

You know what? I actually have one, but I don't know if it calculates 60 seconds correctly.

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Hayden Baillio:

Let me do it. Ready?

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Wendy Hurst:

Yes. Ready. Set. Go. Open source software is defined as software with source code that is publicly blank available. Yes. The GPL license is one of the most commonly used licenses in open source, emphasizing freedom to do what?

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Hayden Barnes:

Modify.

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Wendy Hurst:

Yes. The version control system used for most open source projects is called get. Yes. The world's most popular open source operating system is Blink Linux. Yes. The content management system that powers over 40% of websites is Blink WordPress. Yes. The open source database management system originally developed by Sun Microsystems is called Blink SQL.

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Wendy Hurst:

Ooh, so close. MySQL companies like Canonical and Blink have built business models around supporting open source software.

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Hayden Barnes:

Red hat.

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Wendy Hurst:

Correct.

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Hayden Barnes:

Time.

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Wendy Hurst:

Wow.

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Hayden Baillio:

Six out of seven.

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Wendy Hurst:

That's six questions correct.

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Hayden Barnes:

Wow.

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Hayden Baillio:

We.

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Wendy Hurst:

Wow.

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Hayden Baillio:

You're our first person.

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Hayden Barnes:

That game.

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Wendy Hurst:

I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure for a second. If you're gonna get them, this is how you pass the bar exam. You said.

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Hayden Baillio:

Just absolutely wrecked that game. That was awesome. Absolutely awesome. Wow. And so, okay, that was a great ending to this. I. That was super easy for you. I'm honestly, I'm still a little blown away.

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Hayden Baillio:

Okay. So, anyway, okay, let's just. I think it was the one where you hit it with like, modify. You're like modify. And I was like, you knew that from the gpo? Yeah. All right, all right. You know what?

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Wendy Hurst:

It's in the code and the law or whatever.

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Hayden Baillio:

It's been a absolute pleasure having you on a date. Thanks for taking us through your journey. It's been really, really exciting to hear about. We're going to put a bunch of information in the show notes for this, but, like, where can people follow you and what you do? Where can they come and check out what you're doing?

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Hayden Barnes:

Sure. Follow me on Twitter nxterminal or on GitHub. Rbeard.

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Hayden Baillio:

Sir Redbeard. Nice.

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Wendy Hurst:

Sir Redbeard.

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Hayden Baillio:

Yeah.

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Wendy Hurst:

Spelled exactly like how it sounds.

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Hayden Baillio:

I love it. Well, once again, thank you, Hayden. Thank you to my amazing co host, Wendy. And we will look forward to seeing y'all on the next episode of Everyday Heroes, where we'll dive into another incredible life and journey of someone who has made a significant impact in the open source and open web world. We'll talk to you soon. Heroes.