Rituals: New Year, New Newsletter sort of.

You are receiving this because you have subscribed to a newsletter I maintained in 2022. I recently moved distribution from buttondown to substack. If you rather not receive this newsletter, please find the unsubscribe link below.

My intention is to share my personal product insights and experiences regularly. This email set the tone, but I promise you these will include some S-tier bdougie musings.

TikTok and Rituals

I've always been fascinated by how rituals shape our daily lives, often without us even noticing. These rituals help us transition through our day, from the way we arrange our desks to how we mindlessly scroll through TikTok during bathroom breaks, providing comfort and stability in an unpredictable world.

What's really interesting is how rituals transcend cultures while remaining uniquely personal.

This past week, we saw the TikTok ritual disrupted for a little over 12 hours due to the Supreme Court ruling. It's a product manager's dream to have 130 million engaged users with such a strong bond that it could command the attention of a sitting U.S. president to intervene and restore their familiar experience.

I pushed folks at GitHub to have elements of TikTok style recommendations in your home feed. It never really got off the ground, but imagine swiping left through GitHub notifications.

What happened to OpenSauced?

I stopped regularly delivering this newsletter 2 years ago when I left GitHub to work on my own project, OpenSauced. OpenSauced was recently acquired by the Linux Foundation to help support their efforts under the LFX umbrella.

After working on commercial viability, we found there was only really one player in the space were operating and it was the Linux Foundation. Though we had some early proof points of building rituals in our product, through Highlights and customer Workspaces, we didn’t quite get there. We built a great product, but it was clear by the market, and layoffs, that our future customers had already attributed their budget to the LF and related other foundations for open source insights. Seeing this option, I negotiated a path to join them to continue our discovery together.

My new role as Head of Developer Experience is my focus today, and I hope to share more context on rituals implemented in 2025. For now, I'm just getting started and connecting with stakeholders.

If you're interested in talking about Open Source or providing early product feedback, reply to this email. I'd love to have you on the podcast.

Links:

Ep. #6, The Infinite Nature of Software with Adam Jacob
John and I are joined by Adam Jacob, co-creator of Chef and CEO of System Initiative, to discuss the philosophical and business intersections of open source. Adam shares insights on the evolution of free software, the challenges of monetizing open source projects, and the future of collaborative development in an increasingly commercialized tech ecosystem.

SOOCON 25

I'll be at SOOCON next talking about the State of Open Source Metrics.

Hanselminutes

I appeared on the Hanselminutes podcast recently sharing my experience running OpenSauced from inception to acquisition.

Thanks for reading Teach Me How To Dougie! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

bdougie