Fueling innovative software
July 15-18, 2019
Portland, OR

From open source to InnerSource: A journey into company collaboration

Joe Bowser (Adobe)
12:05pm–12:30pm Tuesday, July 16, 2019
InnerSource Day
 Location: E143/144
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 1 rating)

Level

Beginner

For 10 years—since its creation—Joe Bowser worked on PhoneGap and Apache Cordova, an open source framework using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to make cross-platform mobile applications on iOS, Android, and other platforms. This project grew up on GitHub and even though many projects have surpassed it in popularity, it still has over 2,600 stars and is still being worked on by various independent developers.

Joe now works on a new cross-company initiative to bring ML to various Adobe products. He examines the challenges of using open source methodology and techniques in a company as well as how it’s using GitHub Enterprise to assist in coordinating this internal open source project across products and business units that often have almost nothing in common.

He explores how InnerSource can work as a possible way to transition from the public pressure of working on an open source project while leveraging the methodologies that allow for open source to produce better quality software, since many of them require more discipline instead of just a large number of eyeballs.

Photo of Joe Bowser

Joe Bowser

Adobe

Joe Bowser is a senior computer scientist at Adobe, where he’s the lead developer on the sensei on device team that’s deploying machine learning technologies into various products at Adobe. Previously, he was the creator of PhoneGap for Android and the longest contributing committer to the PhoneGap and Apache Cordova projects. When he’s not contributing to open source at Adobe, he spends his spare time working on various hardware projects, most of which involve first-person-view miniquadcopters.