Building Sustainable Open Source: The Harper Story (Business Focus)

Open sourcing a core product is easy to celebrate, but hard to initiate and sustain. This is a practical story about economic viability and how Harper open sourced our core product while protecting business health, funding continued engineering, and creating the conditions for durable community growth.
Geared towards founders, CTOs, investors, and developer relations and engineering managers, I share Harper’s intimate story of transforming our nearly decade-old, closed source code base into an actively growing open source community. I share what we learned from customer growth patterns, where adoption stalled, and how we recognized the potential of open source. From there, I dive deep into our execution strategy; separating the open source core from the commercial operations customers valued.
You’ll learn how licensing choices and clear boundaries between shapes trust, and how we approached the organizational and technical realities of moving a long-lived product into the open. If you're building or funding open source and need a sustainable model supporting profitability and momentum, this session offers a concrete path grounded in lived experiences.

Open source ecosystems are healthier when organizations sustainably contribute, not just publish code. Yet many efforts describe the end result without explaining how they got there, leaving teams uncertain about making the journey themselves.
This session shares Harper's complete open source story with concrete examples: business decisions that made it viable, technical challenges we faced during transition, and ongoing work maintaining both open source momentum and commercial success. By being transparent about both what worked and what we're navigating (monetization boundaries, licensing decisions, repository synchronization, and community development) this talk helps other teams avoid common traps like unclear commercialization plans, unsustainable technical debt, and trust gaps from ambiguous licensing.
Whether you're a founder evaluating feasibility, an engineering leader planning technical work, or developer relations building community, this talk offers adaptable practices grounded in real decisions. The outcome: more organizations confident they can open source without sacrificing their business or engineering excellence, leading to more durable projects, better-resourced maintainers, and stronger open source ecosystems.

Building Sustainable Open Source: The Harper Story (Technical Focus)

Early in 2025, the Harper team agreed that after nearly a decade of closed source development, we wanted to open source our core product. The challenge: how do we achieve this without disrupting feature development, customer trust, and our overall business success? In this talk, I will share Harper’s intimate story of open sourcing our core product while maintaining engineering excellence.

The initial lift brought challenges like splitting the main repository into multiple open, closed, and source-available distributions, deciding what technical debt to bring forward, and restructuring our build and testing systems. Today, we’re navigating the active development of the new distributions, while maintaining enterprise support; including licensing decisions, architecture composability, repository synchronization, and community development.

Open source ecosystems thrive when production systems can be sustainably maintained, not just published and abandoned. This talk is for engineers, technical leaders, and developer relations teams who want a realistic view of open sourcing production systems without sacrificing business viability or engineering quality.

Open source ecosystems are healthier when organizations sustainably contribute, not just publish code. Yet many efforts describe the end result without explaining how they got there, leaving teams uncertain about making the journey themselves.
This session shares Harper's complete open source story with concrete examples: business decisions that made it viable, technical challenges we faced during transition, and ongoing work maintaining both open source momentum and commercial success. By being transparent about both what worked and what we're navigating (monetization boundaries, licensing decisions, repository synchronization, and community development) this talk helps other teams avoid common traps like unclear commercialization plans, unsustainable technical debt, and trust gaps from ambiguous licensing.
Whether you're a founder evaluating feasibility, an engineering leader planning technical work, or developer relations building community, this talk offers adaptable practices grounded in real decisions. The outcome: more organizations confident they can open source without sacrificing their business or engineering excellence, leading to more durable projects, better-resourced maintainers, and stronger open source ecosystems.

Trials and Tribulations of Self Hosting Next.js

When we set out to support Next.js applications on HarperDB, we quickly discovered that the path from next dev to a production-ready hosting solution was far from straightforward. This talk dives deep into the architectural decisions, technical challenges, and engineering solutions that went into building a flexible, scalable Next.js hosting platform. You'll learn how we tackled version compatibility (going back as far as Next.js v9!), engineered for scalability using worker threads, and all the meanwhile maintained local development experience parity. Whether you're considering self-hosting Next.js applications or interested in advanced deployment architectures, this session will equip you with practical insights and battle-tested strategies.

Node.js Streams Showdown - A Streams and Web Streams Deep Dive

Stream APIs are ubiquitous to modern programming languages, frameworks, and applications. They are powerful APIs that come in all different shapes and sizes. Furthermore, they often are integral pieces to many other, higher-level APIs. Uniquely, Node.js has two distinct streaming APIs, Node.js Streams and Web Streams.

This talk will explore both Node.js streaming APIs focussing on their interoperability, performance implications, optimization strategies, and best practices. The talk will include multiple examples including a glimpse into Harper’s eager query response features, how to implement an HTML live-reload server, and more! Attendees will walk away with a better understanding of streaming fundamentals in Node.js.

Inside the Push for JavaScript Interoperability: Open Source Collaboration in Action

JavaScript’s popularity is unmatched — it powers nearly every application environment, from browsers to servers and everything in between. As Atwood’s Law says, “Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript.” But with this widespread adoption comes a challenge: interoperability.
Groups like the OpenJS Foundation Package Metadata Interoperability collaboration space and the Web-interoperable Server Runtimes Technical Committee (WinterTC, or ECMA TC55) are tackling this challenge head-on by bringing together contributors from across the ecosystem.
In this talk, Ethan Arrowood, active member of the OpenJS Foundation, WinterTC, and Node.js contributor, explores recent developments, ongoing challenges, and opportunities in JavaScript interoperability. Attendees will gain insight into how open source community groups operate, how to get involved, and how collaboration is shaping the future of JavaScript interoperability.