Contribute Back: Embracing the Open Source Spirit with Max Kanat-Alexander (1/3)

Do you know anything about Bugzilla? Sometimes the answer to a simple, unexpected question like this can change our direction. Max Kanat-Alexander, our guest this week in episode 285, once answered this question with a resounding yes because of something he’d done earlier.

Max spent time triaging bugs for the Mozilla project while in college and had learned how to use Bugzilla. He would later deploy and administer the software for his employer, make the decision to write code that added support for PostgreSQL to Bugzilla, become the release manager for the project, and eventually become the chief architect and community lead.

This week you’ll hear how a young Max Kanat-Alexander decided to study computer science and what drew him to embrace the open source spirit through deeper commitment to the Bugzilla project over the course of his career. Max shares some great tips for those looking to contribute to an open source project and thoughts on where the technical lead sits in software engineering. Listen closely to understand the scope of problems people at each software engineering job level are tasked with solving.

Original Recording Date: 06-30-2024

Topics – Meet Max Kanat-Alexander, Experience with FileMaker, The Open Source Spirit, Upgrading Bugzilla and a Decision Point, Becoming a Release Manager, The Role of a Community Lead, Software Engineering Job Levels and the Technical Lead

2:10 – Meet Max Kanat-Alexander

• Max Kanat-Alexander is a Principal Staff Software Engineer at LinkedIn and is one of the technical leads for the developer productivity and happiness team.
• Max has been interested in computers since he was very young.
  • One of the schools Max attended had an old Tandy computer and a 286 computer.
  • When he found out one of these machines didn’t work. Max took it as a personal challenge to get it working again. Max tells us he learned a lot in the process.
  • Max’s family eventually got a computer, which he later broke.
  • Both before and during high school Max worked in IT technician roles.
• Max planned to major in theater, physics, or computer science in college.
  • When he began attending UC Santa Cruz, Max majored in theater.
  • “I quickly discovered that, at least at UC Santa Cruz, the theater major was very theater heavy, and I did not want to study the theory of theater. I wanted to act and direct and produce shows. And so I changed to my next equal interest… And the only computer related major that they had was computer science.” – Max Kanat-Alexander, on pursuing computer science
  • The computer science program was focused on learning to write code and programming languages.
  • In math class in high school, Max would write prime solver programs on his TI-83 calculator instead of paying attention.
• Max was in college from 1999 to 2003 and mentions there wasn’t a lot of mentorship out there to guide hopeful software engineers on career choices.
  • Max tells the story of a classmate in college who was hired to work for Sun Microsystems before finishing school, but that wasn’t something that happened often.
  • Max pursued comp science because he liked computers. Many of his classmates were either pushed to do computer science because it looked like math or science or they really had a passion for computers.

6:37 – Experience with FileMaker

• Max had been building FileMaker databases for people since his early teens. That first project was creating a database of stunt actors for theme park stunt shows.
  • Multiple FileMaker projects followed this, and Max created a FileMaker database for the university housing department, wh