Put open source to work
July 16–17, 2018: Training & Tutorials
July 18–19, 2018: Conference
Portland, OR

Building shared services with an open source approach

Christopher Litsinger (Comcast Cable)
10:05am–10:30am Tuesday, July 17, 2018
Location: E141
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 1 rating)

The open source community fuels innovation that has made a significant impact on lives around the globe. Can any of that energy be successfully captured within commercial organizations? Christopher Litsinger shares lessons learned while building a team around the best of what open source culture has to offer. You’ll learn how Christopher’s team tried to implement open source practices and spread them throughout the organization.

Topics include:

  • Why the team was interested in open source culture (and what parts they tried to avoid)
  • How organizations like the World Health Organization and US Navy have approached culture change
  • General work practices and how they contribute to our success, including remote-friendly work, pair programming, peer reviews, continual experimentation, and the influence from research and academia
  • How the team designed for partnering with other organizations, including how they solicit pull requests for their projects
  • Moving projects from “enterprise source” to open source
Photo of Christopher Litsinger

Christopher Litsinger

Comcast Cable

Christopher Litsinger is director of cloud application platforms at Comcast, where he focuses on building scalable, performant, robust software components for the company’s varied software product development groups. Previously, Christopher lead the team building cloud solutions for Sungard Availability Services. Christopher graduated college and immediately asked the question, “What am I going to do with this degree in English?” He started in an entry-level customer support role, moved into various development and engineering roles, and finally settled into roles focusing on the intersection of infrastructure and code.