3 posts tagged with "Python"

authentik is an open source Identity Provider that unifies your identity needs into a single platform, replacing Okta, Active Directory, and auth0. Authentik Security is a public benefit company building on top of the open source project.

In January of 2024, a well-known open-source maintainer wrote the following message to a contributor: “You copied that function without understanding why it does what it does, and as a result your code IS GARBAGE. AGAIN.”

If you’ve been in open source long enough, you might recognize the tone of Linus Torvalds, creator and lead developer of the Linux kernel. Torvalds’ sometimes cruel messages aren’t rare (there’s a whole subreddit for these rants, after all). But in this case, the target – Google engineer Steven Rostedtstands – stands out.

If we put aside the substance of the disagreement, we can acknowledge that the tone can be intimidating – not so much to Rostedtstands, who can likely handle himself, but to onlookers who are curious about contributing. Not all of open source is like this, of course, but enough of it is like this (or close to this) that exchanges like these can make contributing to open source scarier than it needs to be.

How can a brand new contributor, much less a Google engineer, feel brave enough to contribute?

The initial temptation, for me and probably many open-source fans, is to tell new contributors it’ll all be fine. There are bad parts, we might say, but there are good parts, too. But this approach risks invalidating their fears.

In this article, I’m going to lay out five real reasons why contributing to open source can be scary for new contributors. Alongside those reasons, though, I’m going to provide five practical ways to face the fears and contribute anyway.

authentik is an open source Identity Provider that unifies your identity needs into a single platform, replacing Okta, Active Directory, and auth0. Authentik Security is a public benefit company building on top of the open source project.

Hello world! I'm excited to be joining Authentik Security as CEO. I wanted to take this opportunity to share the experience of my first week with the community and a bit about my background.

At the start of my very first "official" day on the job, I got an overview of the various applications we use from Jens, our founder and CTO. If you have ever been through a company onboarding process, you know that it might take a few days up to a couple weeks to get access to everything, sometimes even longer. In a small and agile startup, that might be as little as a day if you're lucky.

I started authentik in 2018 as an open source hobby project but in 2022, with help from Open Core Ventures, I started Authentik Security, an open core company built around the authentik project.

Building a new startup is, unsurprisingly, quite different from building and maintaining an open source project. With the arrival of funding and the requirement to build a business that could sustain itself now and scale as the company evolved, I had to confront some of the technical choices I made when building authentik – in particular, the choice to build authentik using Python and Django.

The primary reason behind choosing these languages was simple: I knew them well and could write code fast. In retrospect, we know now there was a tradeoff. I was able to code faster but the language itself would eventually impose speed limitations. Python isn’t the slowest language out there but when compared to Node.js and other compiled languages like Go, its speed can seem like a big problem. And Django on top of Python makes it even slower.

And yet, I stand by the decision and as the company has evolved, I think it was a good one. In this post, I’ll explain why this decision was a net positive, the benefits and costs of choosing these languages, and the lessons we learned along the way.