On Building Open Source Solutions

Emile Vauge, the creator of Traefik, an open-source reverse-proxy written in Go, discusses the project's integration with modern software infrastructures such as Kubernetes, Amazon ECS, and Docker Swarm. Traefik is designed to manage ingress traffic dynamically, and its maintainers, split between Containous and external contributors, promote an inclusive environment for contributions by simplifying the maintenance process and automating tasks with bots. Issues and feature requests are managed efficiently through GitHub tools, and the project’s versions are whimsically named after French cheese, reflecting its origins. Despite challenges like managing pull request merges, a bot now automates the process, allowing the team to maintain a release cycle of every two months. Semaphore has significantly improved their CI times, reducing test durations from over 50 minutes to under 10, enabling quicker feedback on pull requests. Vauge also emphasizes the importance of being involved and responsive when open-sourcing company projects and expresses enthusiasm for improvements in Go dependency management with projects like dep.