I was looking at my old development projects recently when I noticed that all of them predate 2005. In 2005, I started work at ePublishing as a Perl developer. In the past 17 years I’ve been:

• a Ruby and Rails developer
• VP of Software Engineering
• Chief Software Architect

In all that time, I’ve written hundreds of thousands of lines of code (maybe more than a million), but it’s locked away.

It’s a bit depressing that almost two-decades of creativity is forever hidden from view. It’s the curse of corporate development: we can write blogs, give talks, and prepare papers, but we can’t show the code itself. All anyone sees are shadows on the wall.

More companies should release their source code. Most of what we write is not the company’s crown jewels. Let people see how you solved that weird 3rd-party integration! Or how you monitor some obscure open-source service.

Every company is standing on a mountain of open-source code. Give back and let your developers have the opportunity to show off!