Ted Husted
Projects:
Weblogs
How long have you been using ASF software?
Since the summer of 2000. I was working with a local PBS station to put their fundraising auction online. Like most stations, WXXI had an annual fund raising auction, but very few stations had online auctions at that time. Since it was a green field, I went shopping for the best platform, and I came close to selecting PHP, but there were some cool new Java products, like Resin and Jetty, coming out in 2000. I was impressed and decided to go with Java.
At the time, web application frameworks for Java were a new idea, and only a few were available. I stumbled upon Struts at Jakarta, and started posting questions to the list. At first, the list traffic was so low, I wasn't sure if the group was still active. But, answers came, and so I kept on posting.
By the Spring of 2001, the station's new auction application was ready to ship using the Struts 1.0 beta. We took over 50,000 bids on 5,000 items with nary a hitch. We added an inventory module for 2002, and the station continued to use the original software unchanged through 2005.
When did you become a committer?
I started a "walking tour" of the infamous MailReader application to help teach myself the Struts framework. I posted the tour as I wrote it, and people kindly corrected my understanding of how things worked as I went. In December 2000, Craig was asking for volunteers to help with the documentation. Mike Schachter and I raised our virtual hands, we became Struts committers 006 and 007.
In what areas of the foundation are you involved?
Aside from Struts, I worked with several other committers to create the Jakarta Commons, which is now a top-level ASF project. I have also helped bring new communities into the ASF through our incubator project, including iBATIS, MyFaces, and WebWork. (WebWork was the foundation of Apache Struts 2.) I became an ASF Member in 2002. Currently, I also help out by handling the email sent to human-response (at) apache (dot) org.
I also try to speak at ApacheCon US when I can. In 2007, I'll be presenting a tutorial on migrating to Ajax from conventional web applications, like those based on Apache Struts.
Do you have any tips for people interested in getting involved with the ASF?
I think the best advice is still "to become a committer, act like a committer". It also helps to have a "thick skin". We are trying to build the best product we can, and sometimes that means making tough, even ruthless, technical decisions. It's important to realize that when we criticize code, we are not criticizing the coder. Of course, a dash of good old-fashioned arrogance helps!
Are you involved with any other open source projects? If so, which one(s)?
I'm a avid user of MySQL and Spring, though I'm not directly involved in the projects. In the past, I have been involved with several small SourceForge projects, and recently, I started a GoogleCode project around the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library. The YUI library is open source, but the development team works for Yahoo! fulltime. Team YUI is an absolute dream to work with, but, being closed, there are things that they can't do. The Yazaar project tries to fill in the gaps, so that the YUI community can enjoy the best of both worlds.
Tell us a bit more about Ted Husted...
I've probably already said too much already! And I definitely already say too much on my homepage :)