Why I open-source

Plumbing is shared infrastructure

Eighteen repositories, MIT-licensed, with the architecture written down before the first line of code. None of them were built to look good on a landing page. Each one started because I needed it on a real production system. Open-sourcing is what happens after the work is real.

18
MIT-licensed repositories
18
Published wikis with architecture
always
Contributors welcome on every repo

Eight stances behind the repositories

These are not principles I post and forget. Every repository on GitHub is built against them, and the ones that drift get fixed. If you find a repository that violates one of these, open an issue.

MIT by default

Permissive licensing on every repository unless there is a specific reason not to. If a problem is general, the answer should be reusable without legal friction. Forks, white-labels and commercial use are explicitly allowed.

Write the diagram first

An architecture decision record, a Mermaid sketch, a one-pager of trade-offs. If I cannot explain a system in a paragraph I do not understand it well enough to ship it. The wiki is the contract.

Plumbing is shared infrastructure

Generic infrastructure should not be re-implemented privately at every company that needs it. Storage engines, MCP servers, sandboxes, observability bootstraps, Terraform modules. These are utilities, not differentiators.

Numbers cite a source

Every benchmark in every README says where it came from. Every chart on the blog marks whether the figure is from a public bench or my own. A transparency footer invites readers to flag bad numbers.

Ship small, ship often

Tight commits, frequent releases, observability before features. A repository nobody can run is closed-source in spirit. Quick-start in the README has to work on a fresh machine.

Safe defaults, day one

Real auth, real row-level security, real audit logs, real observability. SECURITY.md on every repository with a working disclosure path. Defaults you would actually want if you cloned the code at midnight.

A wiki, not a README dump

Architecture, design decisions, quick-start, roadmap. Each on its own page so a reader can jump to the layer they need. The README is the elevator pitch and the link tree.

Read the layer below

Before reaching for the SDK, read what the SDK calls. Most magic is a thin wrapper around a documented endpoint. Knowing the layer below is the unfair advantage and is the whole reason I open-source the layers I have written.

Why this matters

Closed-source plumbing is how a small team reinvents the same merge tree, the same sandbox, the same observability bootstrap, the same retry logic, six times across six employers and never sees the second version. Open-sourcing the layer means the next person starts from the second version. That is the only reason I do it.

Read the code

Eighteen repositories, every wiki published, every README a working quick-start. If you want to push back on a decision, the issues tab is the right place.