Don't bust the crust
Last week I went on my first trip to Sedona. While I’ve spent some time in the red centre of Australia, there is something particular and charming about this ecosystem: towering columns of layered rock, a surprising abundance of life bursting out of the desert floor, and of course the vortexes.
I was there for a team gathering, our third since founding Telepath. My co-founders Stephen, Josh and I are all remote. We’re scattered between San Francisco, Mendocino County, and southern Arizona, and I spent the last four months even further away in Sydney. Remote work suits me well, but I’ve found that a regular cadence of meeting in person is essential for percolating the kind of ideas that require ambient, deep contact.
This deep time is always so fruitful, and there’s a lot I came away excited about. But for now, I want to talk about crust.
One thing you learn hiking at Sedona is to not bust the crust. There’s this crunchy, marshmallow-like layer on the surface of much of the soil — a combination of microbes, fungal strata, and microscopic plant life. It’s a complete ecosystem that provides nutrients for plant life, and protects the land from water runoff (useful in a desert with a dry climate punctuated by monsoonal rains).
Without the crust, larger organisms cannot survive in the landscape. They need something to hold the soil in place, retain moisture, and cycle nutrients. The crust creates the conditions for everything above it to take root.
The open-source ecosystem is like a crust for the landscape of software. It’s a complex web of dependencies, an interlocking mesh that the inhospitable land of raw code more liveable. All the apps you know and depend on today — Ableton, TikTok, Apple Notes, name anything — they all almost certainly depend on this cooperative substrate. And just like the tiny cyanobacteria, sometimes the smallest pieces of this network can be vital, even if they don’t look particularly glamorous (obligatory xkcd).
Currently this ecosystem is under threat from a variety of vectors caused or exacerbated by code generation models. Entire libraries can be forged, bypassing any license restrictions. Open-source maintainers are under intense pressure with a mounting backlog of rubbish pull requests, and on at least one occasion being blackmailed by an errant agent. The concept of open-source licensing seems to breaking down. Some are saying that on small scales, open-source doesn’t even make sense anymore.
But the crust isn’t valuable because it’s hard to manufacture — it’s valuable because it’s alive. Each open-source package represents a point-of-view, a standard of rigour and quality, and a community striving for constant improvement and reliablity over thousands—perhaps millions—of deployments. Open-source is about communities of people.
So, in the spirit of the crust, I’m releasing a few tiny open-source packages that I’ve found useful in my work, and adding a new “Software” section to my site to host them as more emerge.
store-thing: a reactive store that persists state to local storage.emitter: an event emitter class that I use across projects ,dependencies: lazy dependency injection modelled of VSCode.disposable: a consistent interface to define a disposable object (e.g. an object you need to unsubscribe from)daemon: a reliable way to add background cli processes to macOS & Linux
Working on low-level building blocks in the era of coding agents might seem counter-intuitive, but I think it’s actually where we should be spending some serious time as builders. When we give codegen agents good lego blocks and constraints, they can produce work more reliably and with higher quality.
Oh, and if you make something you like, share it — don’t bust the crust!