February 08, 2003

Presentation and open source serendipity

So I’m giving a short presentation on Template Toolkit plugins at the Pittsburgh PM meeting next week. And because most of my work with plugins has been with OI, where I’m just grouping stateless functions under a namespace, I have to think of a good example. And then this post just happens to come along on the TT mailing list. This sort of happy coincidence happens to me a lot with open source software. Most of the time it’s about a feature – I need feature X, poke around a little bit only to find out someone’s already implemented it and it’s in the CVS version. Or that even if the feature isn’t present the hooks for such a feature are and with just a little elbow grease I can do it myself. I assume this is because I have much the same needs as everyone else and that the open source software I use is constantly being developed in response to developer rather than marketer needs. That’s an ecosystem I want to help thrive.

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