adding opensource heartbeat post

Signed-off-by: vsoch <vsochat@stanford.edu>

_posts/2020/2020-08-18-stanford-opensource-heartbeat.md

@@ -0,0 +1,103 @@
+---
+title: "The Open Source Heartbeat"
+date: 2020-08-18 12:30:00
+---
+
+As a research software engineer, I want people to ask me for help. I'm hungry for it
+in fact - collaborating on code gives me personal fulfillment that I'm useful, and needed.
+I'd venture to say that most of us want to feel needed. There is an interesting relationship
+to this need with open source development - when we find ourselves immersed in a community, we feel
+needed. This is what I want to talk about today - how sharing open source contributions
+can contribute to personal fulfillment, and grow community. You can read about [background](#background) 
+in the first section, or skip over my reasons and just jump to the [opensource-heartbeat-action](#action).
+
+<a id="background">
+## A Service Oriented Group: A Problem 
+
+As I've been setting up <a href="https://stanford-rc.github.io/rse-services" target="_blank">Research Software Engineering Services</a>
+the core business model is to find people, labs, or other groups that might need help. I'm
+especially eager because I don't have my own little development team in Research Computing,
+and so finding others in the Stanford community that might need
+help would mean having someone on (a temporary) team with the same goals and passions. It's actually
+the same reason that I love open source - you find communities, demonstrate value, and can
+be needed. But this also leads me to the current conundrum. 
+
+> Nobody seems to ask for help.
+
+And it's understandable - labs might look at the costs of services, and run away.
+They might not even be able to afford the single graduate student they recently brought on.
+What I want to shout from the roof-tops is that you don't need a huge project that warrants
+paying for support! I want Research Software Engineering Services to help with smaller tasks 
+that might be done in an hour or so. I want students and labs to share with me what they are trying to do, and see
+if I have any feedback or offering to help. But the issue goes deeper than that.
+Even if they could afford to pay, they still are likely to not ask for help.
+It could be that maybe they don't know that they can. There definitely isn't any
+training in graduate school that teaches you how to ask for help from some kind
+of software engineering services. The typical thing to do is ask someone else in your
+lab. Asking for help also shows vulnerability.  It's harder than you think.
+
+## Maybe I can find them instead?
+
+Well, if nobody is going to ask me for help, maybe we could do the inverse?
+If I find open source projects at Stanford, I could then poke in on the various
+issues and pull request boards and see if I can help.  This led me to a simple question:
+
+> What open source work is happening at Stanford?
+
+The fact that I couldn't quickly answer this question was troubling. Undoubtably it's
+rampant. But this led me to my next idea - what if I could find Stanford GitHub users,
+and then create an interface to show what's going on?
+
+<a id="action">
+## The Open Source Heartbeat
+
+<div style="padding:20px">
+    <img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rseng/opensource-heartbeat-action/master/img/open-source-heartbeat.png">
+</div>
+
+This led me to creating the <a href="https://github.com/rseng/opensource-heartbeat-action" target="_blank">opensource-heartbeat-action</a>
+repository. The idea is simple - you can start with a list of GitHub usernames (and/or organization names)
+and then have a nightly job that parses events, and deploys an interface to show the most recent.
+If you want the user set to update programatically based on a Query to the GitHub User Search API,
+it also includes a script for programmatically finding users based on a query of interest. For example,
+if I search for Stanford in the location I can be fairly sure to get a Stanford affiliate.
+It's fairly easy to set up - you can add a simple yaml file in your GitHub Workflows folder, and have it
+running nightly. If you want to quickly see it in action, see the Stanford <a href="https://stanford-rc.github.io/opensource-stanford/" target="_blank">open source heartbeat</a>. If you want to add your username to be included,
+please <a href="https://github.com/stanford-rc/opensource-stanford/issues" target="_blank">open an issue</a>!
+We want to proudly showcase open source work going on at Stanford.
+
+### Interface
+
+On the front page, you see the 100 most recent contributions, with filters for each contribution type. But
+you can also browse a single type:
+
+<div style="padding:20px">
+    <img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rseng/opensource-heartbeat-action/master/img/browse.png">
+</div>
+
+
+And you can also view a graph that break downs contribution types:
+
+<div style="padding:20px">
+    <img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rseng/opensource-heartbeat-action/master/img/chart.png">
+</div>
+
+Selfishly, I would use this to find Stanford researchers, look at what they are working on, and then
+ask them if I can be of any help. But you can also use it to generate a nice interface just for your
+organization or username! Here is <a target="_blank" href="https://github.com/vsoch/opensource-heartbeat/blob/master/.github/workflows/generate-opensource-interface.yml">an example</a> that will run nightly just to update
+my contributions. 
+
+<div style="padding:20px">
+    <img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vsoch/opensource-heartbeat/master/img/heartbeat.png">
+</div>
+
+
+It's really up to you!
+
+## So What?
+
+I've created a simple tool to better showcase open source contributions, whether they be for you,
+or your institution. Aside from my personal desire to answer the question "What the heck is going
+on in open source at X," I want to point out that this kind of awareness can also grow community.
+It can help to make a statement that an organization cares about open source development.
+As an instition, it would also be nice to be known for more than <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University" target="_blank">having lots of money</a>. In fact, we should be known for consistent and high quality contributions to open source.