Engineers had a week to choose their adventure. They chose open source.
Twice a year, technologists at Intuit get an entire week called Global Engineering Days (GED) to focus on an area they’re passionate about. Not another hackathon, GED isn’t about winners or prizes; it’s about uninterrupted time for technologists to choose their own adventure and solve a problem that speaks to them. “GED allows you to go rogue, but in a safe way,’’ says Intuit software engineer Josh Harrison, “When you let brilliant people free for a couple days, you’re going to get some brilliant, off-the-wall results that you never considered.”
During this time of radical self-determination, many technologists turn to open source, using external repos tools to build their solutions, contributing to projects they use, or designing something totally new to share with the wider community. We talked with some Intuit technologists about how they most recently leveraged GED 2021 to explore open source:
hooks
Hooks is a Kotlin version of Webpack’s popular Tapable JS library that provides an efficient framework for enabling plugin-driven architecture. Maintained by software engineer Jeremiah Zucker and architect David Stone, hooks began life as a 2020 GED project. Jeremiah says he plans his GED projects around challenges his team faces. For example, hooks came from an effort to bring Tapable to the Java virtual machine for consumption within the team’s projects. Seeing applicability outside Intuit, Jeremiah and David decided to share the solution they created. “Open source and reusability is a key part of what I work on during GED,” says Jeremiah, “At the very least, I want to ensure whatever goodness I can bring to my team is able to be leveraged by others at Intuit, if not completely open to the world.”
perfsize
Richard Shiao, a software engineer focused on data quality, has used several GEDs to develop and iterate on perfsize, an open source project he worked with a team to create and maintain. To host machine learning models, owners need to determine configuration settings that are cost-effective, but powerful enough to meet requirements. Perfsize uses automated performance testing to determine the best size and settings for infrastructure to meet hosting needs. Like Jeremiah and David, Richard first used his GED time to solve for one team’s need to automate infrastructure sizing test steps for running models on AWS SageMaker. After talking with others interested in perfsize functionality, the team open sourced it. Since then, Richard and his collaborators have used GED to extend perfsize’s applicability. “I appreciate that Intuit enables me to pick an interesting problem, experiment with new solutions, and continue work over multiple sessions,” says Richard, “The dedicated time lets me focus and make good progress.”
Open source improvements
In addition to working on open source projects, technologists have used GED to improve Intuit’s open source workflow. Software engineer Samantha Monteiro used the most recent GED to reinvent the Intuit review and approval process for open source projects. “I have a passion for open source,” says Samantha, who wondered how she could make life easier for the Intuit community. Samantha and her team worked to design and build an internal portal that integrates with developers’ day-to-day productivity tools and cuts down on the time it takes to run a project through approvals. “Day-to-day work responsibilities can take time away from things I’d love to work on,” says Samantha, “With GED, Intuit gives me that time back so I can work on innovative ideas.”
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