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I found an interesting list of possible Head of Community interview questions: LinkedIn If I was hiring a Head of Community, I’d ask these questions: 1. What... If I was hiring a Head of Community, I’d ask these questions: 1. What community are you a part of today as a member? Not as a leader. People who only ever host have usually forgotten what it feels like to walk into a room knowing no one…
I was looking at the Webflow Analyze report of top pages on the OpenSSL Foundation webpage and noticed we have a lot of 404s: A 404 means someone arrived via a broken or missing URL. Often the problem comes when a site is redesigned and the structure has changed. Since we launched a new site at the start of the year, it pays to investigate. Unfortunately I couldn’t figure out how to do that with…
Do you know how splashing a little water on your skin helps keep you cool on a hot day? Scientists call this an endothermic process that takes heat from your skin and transfers it to the water that evaporates into the atmosphere. Our bodies tap into that physical phenomena when we sweat. Because energy must be conserved, that water vapor carries heat which is released when it condenses. Unlike…
Using Google as a spell checker, I saw this "curious" prompt. After following the suggested search, I'm no wiser as to why it was suggested.
OpenSSL’s documentation is a bit of a mess. The library is massive, not everything is documented and the documentation that does exist can be hard to use. This is especially true for people who are starting with no knowledge of the library. It all starts with the home page: Here’s the truth: nobody has read those paragraphs. To rip off a Far Side cartoon , here’s what most users get from a…
I guess I always knew the Declaration of Independence must have gone through a few drafts before it was approved by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776. But I didn’t know what was left out until I read Jefferson’s “original Rough draught” . The big omission is: [King George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the…
A couple years ago I asked How’s business at Stack Overflow? Prosus, the current owner of Stack Overflow, issued an annual report for the year than ended in March, 2026. The graphic featuring Stack Overflow puts a positive spin on the situation: I had to look up GoodHabitz. It’s an online training company that Prosus bought around the same time as Stack Overflow. It was clearly a poor investment…
This post was provoked by a recent installment of Jillian Bejtlich ’s excellent newsletter, The Community Nerd : thecommunitynerd.com The Maintenance Crew Problem What if your engaged users are actually infrastructure, not audience? You should read it yourself and come back here to compare notes. To summarize, Jillian is proposing that the people we often think of as the community (people who are…
Kindle with an important notification about a new book from . . . Aristotle?
Earlier in the week my family visited the Seamus Heaney HomePlace in Northern Ireland on the recommendation of a couple of people I visited in Dublin. I knew nothing about the Nobel-winning, Irish poet, but I was assured the cafe was worth the visit in any case. It was! I also wandered though the library which had several examples of Heaney’s poetry including “Digging” : If you want to hear the…
Issue backlogs have a negative impact on open source communities that isn't particularly visible. Nothing is more discouraging than shouting into the void and that's what it feels like to add yet another issue to a growing backlog. Addressing a backlog requires a plan and people dedicated to following that plan. https:// openssl.foundation/news/reduci ng-the-issue-backlog
In recent years Joy and I have used a phrase “shocking but not surprising” more frequently than we could have predicted. It’s not a phrase we coined and we don’t use it so much in political contexts as you might expect. But what do we mean? Fundamentally the phrase passes judgement on the character of people we apply it to. This isn’t a post calling those people out explicitly, so let me give an…
I studied Atmospheric Sciences at UCLA. Theoretically useful for the first half of my career (see below). I suspect it helps me think about complex systems such as communities, but that might be self-justification for my wasted youth. Teachers and my parents told me I should be a writer. I wanted to be in the Air Force, which is why I picked my major. (My dad and two of my younger brothers are Air…
I used to read constantly. A trip to the library meant a stack of books taken out with hopefulness and returning usually meant mild regret for returning some unread. I spent hours lounging around consuming books as quickly as I could. When I started working full time, commuting for hours each week and building our family, reading became less of a priority. But I still listened to audiobooks in the…
I ended up writing a review of a movie I don’t much like. It’s entirely optional to the main point of this post, so you can jump past it . Joy and I watched Outcome on Apple TV the other day. Keanu Reeves stars as actor who is returning to the limelight after recovering from a heroin addiction. His name in the film is “Reef Hawk” which is somehow not an anagram of Keanu Reeves . It opens…
RE: https:// mathstodon.xyz/@ionica/1164023 59721533525 The OpenSSL Foundation is releasing a board game today! You can't get it yet, but we will be taking it to conferences once the game is shipped. https:// openssl.foundation/news/post-q uantum-trails-board-game
Happy World Quantum Day to those who do and do not celebrate.
I was thinking about this kind of thing before I read your post. In a perfectionist society it is hard to imagine that it is necessary to be ready for things to go wrong. Easy to say, but hard to come up with great ideas for fixing something like the lubrication when it is too late. I loved the movie about the Voyagers and how they realized that the Jupiter fly by would be a problem unless the…
On the wall behind my desk, I display LEGO models of Apollo mission spacecraft. Anyone who has seen one of the dramatizations of Apollo 13 understands the essential romance of space travel. If anything goes wrong in space, it will require ingenuity and luck to return home. We have the darkness of space to match the Homeric “ wine-dark sea ”. I’ve been involved (on the ground) with two space…
For a long time hand axes, AKA bifaces , were used to butcher animals, cut wood, dig, drill holes and make fire. The flakes produced when fashioning and reworking flint axes would have been used for more precise cutting. And some hand axes show no signs of wear, which suggests they were used for ritual purposes. While stone age people certainly used wood tools that have not survived in the…
So I watched one half of football this season. That includes high school, college and professional. This would have surprised my 30-year-old self who had season tickets to UCLA football and after church I regularly could be found “watching football” (our term for me falling asleep in front of the TV). I guess I just had too many other things going on in life and I already dedicate so much of my…
I see it's once again time to post this: https:// taggart-tech.com/discord-alter natives
The big deal for OpenSSL 4.0 is that it will remove features . This is always a risk for low-level libraries because it means people might see build failures with the latest version and just give up on upgrading. But extra complexity, especially for software designed to secure data and network connections, comes at a cost. Removing code that ought not be used anymore is a feature.
The video from my @ fosdem talk, How the OpenSSL community was built on Heartbleed , is now up! I had a great time presenting it and the questions I got in the session were interesting. Happy to answer (or at least ponder) and questions you might have here.
Strange what brings me out of lurk mode: https:// meta.stackoverflow.com/questio ns/434509/can-we-not-do-over-a-year-ago-please/438041#438041
This post isn’t about game 7 of the 2025 World Series when the Blue Jays nearly won in the bottom of the 9 th . With one out and the bases loaded, Daulton Varsho slapped a hot grounder to Miguel Rojas at second. After a quick glance over to Mookie Betts, who was too far off of second base to start a double play, [1] Rojas threw home in order to prevent Isiah Kiner-Falef from scoring the winning…
RE: https:// infosec.exchange/@codinghorror /115852927913242505 One eye-opening thing I discovered when I started working at Stack Overflow was how many junk questions were filtered out automatically by the software. Then even more questions are rejected by the community. Finally questions are just left unanswered, which might be the most discouraging thing of all. The "Optimizing for pearls"…
I'm going to speak at FOSDEM about how the biggest disaster to hit OpenSSL revived the community. We don't wish for calamity but it often clarifies latent problems in a system.
It appears my favorite source for the shrug emoticon has gone out of business. (See the Wayback Machine for it's full glory .) I'm proud to offer my cheap knockoff alternative: https:// jlericson.com/shrug
When I was trying to make a go of freelancing last year, I directed my clients to Discourse, which is far and away the best community platform available. A great feature is that it’s open source, which means it will survive the company that built it. I admire that company quite a bit. Unfortunately, they had to lay some people off today . (I originally noticed on LinkedIn.) The blog post explains…
In my State of the OpenSSL Community talk, I compared the popularity of Taylor Swift when measured by Google search trends to Heartbleed. I did not know about this @ SwiftOnSecurity joke or I would have included it in my slides. Next time! The screenshot is from SecMeme and my talk can be found on YouTube .
The OpenSSL Conference was a great success and I’m looking through the data we collected from attendees. One data point we asked for was “Country Code” which produced a wide variety of responses (in no particular order): Country Code 420 CZ CZE Česko +420 Czech republic Czechia Czech Republic cz Of course all of these are valid answers to that vague prompt that all point to the same country .…
I gave a talk about the state of the OpenSSL community. It turns out to be a pretty good introduction to the history of an often unseen open source project that allows everyone to communicate over the internet without worrying that our private data will be intercepted. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=b30biARiETY
Recently I got my first crown. It was a long process that required drilling out an old filling and carefully fitting the crown on my broken tooth. The dentist was young. Maybe a year or so out of dentistry school and new to the practice. He’s a wonderfully polite guy who called me “sir” even after I reminded him of my name and asking me with “please” and “thank you” to turn my head this way or…
Had a lovely evening while playing an experimental board game on post-quantum # cryptography with people from Tampere University, the OpenSSL Foundation and Cybernetica. A fitting end for the 2025 # OpenSSL Conference.
When I was in Little League every team had “that kid”. He was probably the coach’s son and had gone to the batting cage often enough to hit hard. He could rope balls into the outfield or reach on an inevitable error. He threw a curve, so was basically unhittable as a pitcher. And he would rotate to shortstop when his arm got tired on the mound. He was playing to be eligible for the all-star…
. . . before she released her first album.
I'm giving a talk at the OpenSSL Conference and this is one of my potential slides. And yes, it's surprising that more people searched for OpenSSL than Taylor Swift.
The OpenSSL Library continues to depend on outside contributions. Here's a quick summary of what made it into the main branch in July: https:// openssl-library.org/post/2025- 08-08-july-contributors/
Finishing with that alleged backgammon board is a nice touch.
As Einstein might have said, "AI does not play dice." https:// meta.jlericson.com/t/ai-cant-u nderstand-dice/443
George Stocker got me looking at AI-generated dice and I’m fascinated/horrified. Here are some examples Grok gave me when I asked for “a pair of dice”: And ChatGPT: And DeepAI: And OpenArt: Only a couple of the dice are potentially fair. Most have too many fives. Two dice have 3 fives showing. A more subtle problem is that opposite faces must add up to 7, so it should never be possible to see a 3…
@ jericson I'd simply start with "does everyone know what a sizzle reel is?" and then have a quick explanation if needed. From experience, that's often more expedient than trying to find a new term.
Back of the envelope math: Americans are as likely to know what a "sizzle reel' is as not. Only a quarter of non-Americans know the meaning of the term. My sample is almost perfectly divided between people who grew up in the US and those who did not. A little over a third of my sample know what a "sizzle reel" is. So I guess it probably makes sense to either use another term or define what we mean…
There were 7 first-time contributors to the OpenSSL Library in June and one second-time contributor. Most interesting was a pull request that changed a single constant and dramatically reduced the memory footprint of the library. https:// openssl-library.org/post/2025- 07-10-june-contributors/
I recorded a "State of the OpenSSL community" for 3.5. I learned a lot preparing for it and I hope you will learn something too. https:// youtu.be/bKGbNQAe5J0
I think Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement policies are terrible, cynical, ineffective and a giant waste of money. Here is photographic evidence that I oppose those policies (among others): This could have been avoided if Congress would just do its job. For instance, the proposed 2007 bill would have provided a path to citizenship for many people while also increasing border enforcement. No…
We've been collecting user stories in June, but there's still time for you to add yours! How do you use OpenSSL? https:// openssl-foundation.org/post/20 25-07-03-wild-ending/
This sounds promising! I do have some questions, though. "20 to 60 minutes a day" — Do I have to do that all at once, or can I stretch it out by working a few minutes an hour? "daily salary can reach 200 to 500 US dollars" — Assuming I work the full 60 minutes, that works out to $200 to $500 an hour. I'd like to bill more than one hour at that rate. "The basic salary is more than 2,000 US dollars…
This sounds promising! I do have some questions, though. "20 to 60 minutes a day" — Do I have to do that all at once, or can I stretch it out by working a few minutes an hour. "daily salary can reach 200 to 500 US dollars" — Assuming I work the full 60 minutes, that works out to $200 to $500 an hour. I'd like to bill more than one hour at that rate. "The basic salary is more than 2,000 US dollars…