The New Stack Podcast

The Story Behind Capital One's Fork Of An Open Source Project

Episode Summary

A pull request is a potential contribution back to a project on Github. It can be difficult to manage all of the requests that come in and the need to automate the approval of pull requests has led to the creation of several open source projects. LGTM (Looks Good to Me)is one such automated system, built around GitHub.  It locks pull requests from being merged upstream until a given number of approvals have been received. LGTM does not come pre-configured for being bolted into certain implementers’ existing tool chains.  Now, being a general-purpose project, perhaps no one should expect it to be configured this way.  But then what’s the purpose of the open source development process if not to open up integration capabilities to implementers? At the last OSCON conference, Capital One lead software engineer Jon Bodner tells the story of how LGTM’s principal developer gave his team his blessing to produce a fork that adds functionality that may be more specific not just to Capital One or another financial institution, but any organization of its magnitude. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7mWHq-ONZA

Episode Notes

A pull request is a potential contribution back to a project on Github. It can be difficult to manage all of the requests that come in and the need to automate the approval of pull requests has led to the creation of several open source projects. LGTM (Looks Good to Me)is one such automated system, built around GitHub.  It locks pull requests from being merged upstream until a given number of approvals have been received.

LGTM does not come pre-configured for being bolted into certain implementers’ existing tool chains.  Now, being a general-purpose project, perhaps no one should expect it to be configured this way.  But then what’s the purpose of the open source development process if not to open up integration capabilities to implementers?

At the last OSCON conference, Capital One lead software engineer Jon Bodner tells the story of how LGTM’s principal developer gave his team his blessing to produce a fork that adds functionality that may be more specific not just to Capital One or another financial institution, but any organization of its magnitude.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7mWHq-ONZA