#pkgcloud

This week, I was granted commit permissions on nodejitsu/pkgcloud. This is a huge indication of trust from the folks at Nodejitsu, and not something I take lightly. Early in my career, while at drugstore.com, I learned the difference between ownership and stewardship, and it's something I still carry with me:

Stewardship is an ethic that embodies the responsible planning and management of resources. The concepts of stewardship can be applied to the environment, economics, health, property, information, religion etc. Stewardship is often linked to the principles of sustainability.

Part of what was so appealing about working for Rackspace was our approach to Open Source Software and being part of the OpenStack community. Take a look at our node.js SDK plan as a perfect example; rather than build our own package, let's go out into the community and make the best cloud provisioning package even better. It's about being responsible members of the community and being good stewards.

The funny thing about stewardship in the OSS community is that it applies even before you're a core maintainer of a project. To a degree, it's fundamentally part of what makes a community healthy and vibrant. Just like when I mow my neighbor's front lawn or they watch my girls when they play in front yard, it's about having each other's backs and filling in the gaps when necessary.

The reality is my workload probably increases as a core committer. The bar must be high for the core team, and I need to ensure my commits always reflect the standard of quality we're hoping to achieve for Rackspace as a company, as well as as a member of the vibrant #node.js community.

I've been spending a fair amount of time looking at the OpenStack and Rackspace compute API implementation (in preparation for a future major update to pkgcloud) and I realized that it's very easy to make a change to a signature and not realize the cross-provider impact it may have.

For example, consider this multi-provider example:

var pkgcloud = require('pkgcloud'), providers = ['amazon', 'joyent', 'rackspace', 'azure', 'openstack'], async = require('async'), helper = require('helper'); // Loop through our providers and create a client async.forEachSeries(providers, function(provider, next) { var client = pkgcloud.compute.createClient(helper.getProviderConfig(provider)); // Create a new server, and then add a key client.createServer(helper.defaultServerOptions(provider), function(err, server) { client.addKey({ name: 'my-key', key: 'some-key-value' }, function(err) { next(); }); }); }, function(err) { process.exit(0); });

The point is that a subtle change in how one of the providers parses options for either createServer or addKey could result in a failure.

Obviously, we should have test cases for these (we do for a fair number already) but additionally, I think we can do some organizational changes to better communicate to future contributors the implication of being a cross-provider method.