Abstract
In this talk I would like to present my journey of starting 2 open source projects and maintaining them for 5 years.
We will start with a technical deep dive of my first project "quicktime_video_hack", which started as a hack, but turned into a useable tool implemented with Go that allows you to record iOS screens and audio with Linux. You will learn how you can reverse engineer USB based protocols and why Go was a great choice for implementing this, but also some pitfalls the language had in store for me.
The second project, go-iOS lets you automate iOS devices through running ui tests, install apps and much more. All of this without even owning a Mac. Would you like to use iOS devices in a CI with cheap Linux boxes rather than expensive and hard to maintain Macs? Yeah you can do that.
After talking about some of the technical challenges and design choices I made building my open source libraries and tools, I would like to share what I have learned from being a maintainer of small open source projects. How I built a small community of contributors and sponsors and how I stayed motivated to do all of this as a side project.
To conclude the talk, I would like to give a short outlook on what's next on the roadmap.
