Open source highlights

I spend between 4 and 20 hours every week on free/libre/open source projects for the benefit of everyone. As you might already be aware of the involved trade-offs, this is time I don't get to spend with my family, my own needs, or my own business, therefore keeping a careful balance is of utmost importance.

Any support to sustain this volunteering effort goes a long way towards justifying this investment.

To get an idea of what I mostly work on, I collected my main projects below for your convenience.

Rex

I maintain Rex, the friendly automation framework. Out of 39100+ total distributions on CPAN, it's the most popular automation solution, and currently the 51st most popular overall according to the MetaCPAN leaderboard.

Gentoo

I'm a proxied maintainer for various Gentoo packages both in the official Portage tree and in my personal overlay. Through these projects I'm exposed to many different technologies, and I enjoy contributing back to them on various levels.

Open Source Contributors' meetup

I'm also the founder and organizer of regular Open Source Contributors' meetups (Karlsruhe, Berlin). It is a platform providing dedicated space and time to enable others to contribute. Building such communities is one of the most rewarding experiences for me.

Open source office hours

Do you want to learn more about my projects, plans, and efforts? Ask me anything during my open source office hours.

Sponsorware

On top of my regular open source work, I provide sponsorware projects as additional value for those who decide to actively support my efforts. These projects are exclusively available to my sponsors first (depending on their chosen tier), and once certain goals are reached, will be published for free. I believe this model has benefits for all involved parties:

• as an author, I get validation, feedback and partial funding of my ideas
• sponsors get additional value early
• everyone gets the results after a certain validation threshold is reached

Already published

• Rex::Hook::File::Impostor (GitHub, CPAN): a Rex module to execute file management operations on a copy of the target file instead of the original. This could be particularly useful to combine with Rex::Hook::File::Diff to show a diff of changes as a preview instead of actually applying the changes.

Available to sponsors

• Secret::Store: a Perl module to interact with various secret management solutions, like pass, the standard unix password manager. It is designed to support pluggable backends for other systems. It will be open sourced as soon as a goal of 8 sponsors is reached.

Further ideas (coming soon*):

• Rex::CMDB::JSON: a Rex module to handle CMDB data in JSON format.
• libyear for Perl: "A simple measure of software dependency freshness. It is a single number telling you how up-to-date your dependencies are."
• Rex::Pkg::Portage:: improved Rex support for package management with Portage.
• Rex::Service::OpenRC: improved Rex support for service management with OpenRC.

_{*: no promises, but let me know which one would you be interested in}

Support my efforts

I find GitHub Sponsors a great way to directly support the individuals who keep open source going behind the curtains. If you appreciate my work, or it helps you to make your customers happy, please consider sponsoring or hiring me to gain even more value!

Some of my sponsorship tiers are geared towards individuals, and some of them are better fit for businesses. Either way, a monthly sponsorship would mean a lot to me! If you don't find a good match for your ideas, let me know.

Need even more value?

Book my professional services as an independent advisor.