Tobias Koppers doesn’t work for Instagram. He never has. But since 2014 he’s been responsible for maintaining an important component of the web version of Instagram.
Koppers is the creator of webpack, an open source code bundling tool for JavaScript. Basically, webpack enables code splitting, allowing developers to optimize their JavaScript code and split it up into smaller chunks so that when you visit a web application, the most important pieces of code download first. This makes web applications faster because you don’t have to download the entire application before you can start using it.
Webpack began as part of an academic project in 2012. Like so many other open source projects, it started out as a way to scratch an itch. “I was working on a web application for my master’s thesis in computer science and I was looking for a code optimization tool,” he explains in a recent episode of The ReadME Podcast. Unhappy with the way other tools handled code splitting, he wr
Nadia Eghbal’s new book, Working In Public: the Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, may not have been on your short list of books to read this year. It’s admittedly a nerdy topic: it’s about open source projects, roles and responsibilities; the rise of GitHub as a developer platform; and how developer culture is evolving around the new power of creator platforms.
I recommend you get it. It is mostly about software development, but the core insight of the book is bigger: Eghbal clearly sees and articulates something important about the way we
make things, and how that’s changing.