Brian Muenzenmeyer
Node.js Maintainer | Author, Approachable Open Source | Principal Engineer, Engineering Enablement, OSPO @ Target
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
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Brian lives in Chanhassen, Minnesota but hails from Manitowoc, where it was always cooler by the lake and is now a fantastic ice-breaker at parties. He has four boys that keep him bald. He does a little of everything, and prefers it that way. Sometimes that’s called being a unicorn 🦄, duck 🦆, or a jack-of-all-trades 🧰, but he likes to land on the Seussical-form—Sneelock of the Circus 🎪!
With a career spanning many roles, from developer, UX team of one, product manager, analyst, and freelancer, Brian brings an experienced and broad approach to many disciplines. He and his wife Megan’s small business keeps them exhausted and grounded in customer delivery, innovation, and warrantee-voiding laser maintenance. He’s been published in Smashing Magazine, CSS-Tricks, Shop Talk Show, Sustain, and led workshops at Web Design Day and the Node.js Collaborator Summit. He maintains the Node.js website, and has organized consecutive Grace Hopper hackathons towards first contributions from attendees. Open source software threads into many aspects of his life, and has opened doors he’d never thought imaginable. It can do that for you too. Much of this culminated in the writing of Approachable Open Source. Give it a read.
When not writing or working within open source software, Brian lives out programming tropes of drinking coffee and woodworking. He enjoys soccer, playing games with his sons, especially X-Wing or Chess, and never turns down a milkshake. Him and Megan spend as much time outside as they can muster, often playing with their kids, deepening the pickleball rivalry on their makeshift court, chasing clouds, or digging up the yard.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Node.js - You Might Not Need a Dependency
Advancements over time in Node.js are improving the out of the box experience. New versions are released all the time across Active LTS and Current development lines. It's easy to miss something between the release notes and our busy work schedules. Through the efforts of contributors over several recent majors, great new features are landing. Each is useful in isolation, but put together they form a more and more comprehensive standard library.
We’ll walk through 6 recent improvements to the standard library. Each feature may replace a dependency in the stack, simplifying your footprint and reducing support burden. We’ll walk through complete before and after diffs, get real about production readiness, and use live examples.
This iterative evolution of the project is part of a larger system of learning - continual innovation and stable foundations in balance and conflict. We'll contextualize how this is a marker of a vibrant, competitive ecosystem. and what we can do to keep it that way in our careers and on our teams. Lastly, I’ll inspire attendees to see themselves within these pace layers and find the open source engagement that meets their constraints, skillsets, and time constraints.
The march of tech is forever forward, and it’s easy to miss mature software updates amidst social media darlings. But often these foundational projects plod along with the certainty of inertia and iteration. I want to highlight how one mature project, Node.js, is doing just this, and how it’s part of a larger narrative of coalescence of userland into core functionality. I’ll show other instances of this at work too, and inspire attendees to see themselves in this landscape.
Finite Source Machines: Approachable Contribution for Busy Humans
The ubiquity, depth, and intersections of the open source software landscape inspire and frustrate, deliver and delay. We’ve come to rely on these projects to power the modern world. Our dependence is welcome, undeniable, amorphous, liberating, and under threat. It can feel intimidating and thankless. We need not buy into fatalistic perspectives of unsustainable outcomes. Where does one even begin?
Participation in open source as a movement takes all of us working in whatever capacity we can. Increasingly that capacity is strained and distracted. But this isn't a time for guilt—this is cause for celebration! I promise you, there are a lot of avenues to engage. It's the contributions, large and small, sustained and one-time, that add up to change.
You are participatory in the ecosystem, as a user. You are part of something larger than our current issue, project, role, or company. You don’t need permission to do your job; you have agency to act upon the full spectrum of engagement. Leave with firmer footing than ever that open source needs you, and that you are enough to sustain it.
Much of the world we live in is underpinned by the open source ecosystem. There's plenty of data to support this, from LF, from HBS, and beyond. Everyone is participatory, as users. A consumer, by definition, is exposed to the outside world of supply chains, vulnerability, and convenience. It's a nuanced dependency arrangement. Many that contribute, and those that wish they did, may find opportunity bias toward code. Are these two viewpoints, consumption and contribution, exclusive means to show up? No. This is a false narrative that furthers no growth nor sustains community. Worse, it creates an intimidating environment closed off from newcomers, learners, and casual contributors.
I propose a better way, one with intentionally designed avenues for contribution and collective grace in exploring those pathways. This perspective is rooted in reciprocity... between maintainer, contributor, and consumer...a mutual relationship more than a license and code. A full spectrum of engagement presents itself for those that attune their senses, and to those that design within it. We'll highlight the spectrum of engagement, contextualize it for all parties, and make the case that we all have a part to play to create inclusive community. We are all part of something larger, and open source software is a tangible manifestation of this theory.
I'll emphasize corporate technologists as the latent energy the movement needs, and equip them with tactics and air-cover to get off the ground.
Much, if not all of the tech at the conference will be underpinned by open source software. Attendees, their coworkers, and their employers, they are all the potential energy open source needs- what we need to do is ACTIVATE them.
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