Building Bridges

This week, I was tasked with reading the first half of Roads and Bridges: the Unseen Labor Behind our Digital Infrastructure by Nadia Eghbal. I also read the bug report titled Critical Linux filesystem permissions are being changed by latest version by user Crunkle from 14 days ago. The former reading discussed the growth of open source from a small movement to the underpinning infrastructure behind most of today’s widely used software. Following the explanation of how open source software became so integral to the modern world, the paper describes how this infrastructure is beginning to crumble, and that spells disaster for millions. That point is driven home with the contents of the second reading documenting a fatal bug in NPM, a package manager that a large percentage of web developers (front and backend) rely on.

For the remainder of this post, I’m going to focus mainly on the larger reading, but I wanted to get a quick word in about the bug report. I think that the report was very well written and I give it two thumbs up. The author gave a decent amount of information and was, from my point of view, rather thorough on trying to find and explain the problem. The author from the last reading on properly writing bugfixes would be proud. My only issue is with the communities response to the bugfix and their anger at the small team of people who work very hard to upkeep something so hugely used.

My Review

Roads and Bridges was a very informative and entertaining read. The author did a very good job giving historical context for the problem of crumbling open source infrastructure. This historical information seemed well sourced, and seeing the growth of open source from a small movement to a large part of industry through the eyes of people who went through it was really cool. I think it was very useful (an intuitive) of the author to liken the open source software many have come to rely on with our modern physical infrastructure. I felt like this gives context to readers who have less of an understanding of how software is actually made, and the problems behind maintaining it. I’d also like to break that out as its own point; The author did a great job bringing this complex subject to the understanding of any reader. I think communicating ideas is hard, especially to those uninitiated to the ideas being expressed. The way the Author wrote this was informative enough to give good context to those who don’t understand what’s going on while not going into so much depth as to hold back those who already understand the subject. I would recommend this to anyone to read, if they were interested.

It’s hard for me to find much issue with Roads and Bridges because I thought it was really good, and I haven’t finished reading it yet. Stylistically, I didn’t like the small info sections (tan background) that were set apart as their own thing. I think this could have been better done in line with the rest of the book. Any more criticism I think is best left until I finish the book, as I may have my currently unanswered questions remain so.

Unanswered Questions?

yes, unanswered questions. Write now, Most of what i’m reading is discussing how the infrastructure of most software is open source, and it’s falling apart slowly. I can see how that’s happening at this point, but I can’t yet see a solution. I also found myself wondering through this reading how many projects no longer have the original developer contributing to the codebase and whether, on average, this is a positive or negative for the project.

All in all, I give the reading up to this point a 5/5. When I finish the next section of the reading, I’ll use this score as a base, so if the next half is completely terrible, 0 points, I’ll still give it 5/10.