Working in Public

Nadia Eghbal is a journalist and researcher who investigates how the internet empowers independent creative. From 2015 to 2019, she concentrated on open source software development, both individually and at GitHub, to improve the open source developer experience. She is the author of the Ford Foundation book Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure, in which she argues that open source code is a type of public infrastructure that must be maintained.

Open source software, in which creators disclose code that anyone can use, has long been used to predict other online activity. It gave an optimistic paradigm for public cooperation in the late 1990s, but in the last 20 years it has evolved to solo operators who build and distribute code that is consumed by millions.

Among the best books on application development and programming, Nadia Eghbal's Working in Public gives an intimate look at modern open source software development, its history over the last two decades, and the implications for an internet reoriented toward individual producers. Eghbal, who interviewed hundreds of developers while attempting to improve their GitHub experience, contends that current open source provides a paradigm for understanding the issues faced by online creators. She examines the trajectory of open source projects, including:

• the platform of GitHub, for hosting and development;
• the structures, roles, incentives, and relationships involved;
• the often-overlooked maintenance required of its creators;
• and the costs of production that endure through an application's lifetime.

Eghbal also investigates the role of platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, YouTube, and Instagram, which lower infrastructure and distribution costs for producers while vastly expanding the breadth of interactions with their audience.

Individual developers, rather than teams, are more central to open source communities. Similarly, if creators, rather than separate communities, are to become the focal point of our online social systems, we must better understand how they operate, which we can achieve by analyzing what happened to open source.

Author: Nadia Eghbal

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Working-Public-Making-Maintenance-Software/dp/0578675862/

Ratings: 4.5 out of 5 stars (from 322 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #83,752 in Books

#3 in Computer Quality Control

#5 in Cross-platform Software Development

#15 in Mobile App Development & Programming