At my current job, I’m the only one doing any sort of programming work. I basically am the “tech solutions” guy and although we do have an IT department. The work we do is bastly different.
So this is a great oportunity for me to present open source software and, while my current company is a deeply entrenched windows user, I have been able to convince colleages and my boss that sometimes straying from it has lots of benefits (specially in the wallet department).
Without further ado, here are the open source projects I managed to implement onto my fully windows company:
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A ubuntu LTS web server: One of the bigger projects I was tasked with was making an internal utilities website. As linux is king in the web world it was fairly easy to get this setup approbed and as an added bonus I got to implement a fairly similar ‘0 downtime’ setup I saw showcased on youtube. Using industry standard tools like docker or git and some good ol’ bash. Here we use pgAdmin to connect to the Postgress server and do basic maintenance tasks.
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Headwind’s mobile device management service: This one I’m fairly proud of, my IT department has 500+ phones to setup each year and all of these were done manually, as they didnt find any provider that didn’t offer a cost-effective solution. With Headwinds model I was able to setup another small test server and showcase it. While the solution aint perfect, I managed to convince my manager that this is something we should go forward with. To be honest, I’m just proud that I saved hours of work for whichever poor interns would have been tasked with manually doing half a thousand phones.
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Mozilla Thunderbird: This one’s one of those quick and easy fixes. New reports only came in through mail, so I setup a client that downloads these to files the other departments use. Here I am sure I can find a way better solution, specially one that doesnt require a different instance per target folder.
While this is an overall short list, progress is progress and I am constanly on the look for replacements for tools I feel forced to use.
For example, Power Automate. I am looking for a solution that lets me export to an exe and has the strong selector tools it’s using. AutoHotKey seems to be a great replacement but it’s still just relying on screen position which doesnt have the portability I need. Pywinauto has great promise but I havent gotten the downtime to re-implement something working on it.
Would be awesome to hear more people stories of switching themselves, others, and their work/business to open source
Love to hear it, thanks for sharing 🫶
That sounds exciting! Couple catty comments in here but I think you’re doing good work.
Given the “deeply entrenched windows” in the company, together with a presumably similarly equipped ICT department, how are you protecting your department and the company against your absence?
In other words, what happens if you get hit by a bus?
I got hit by a bus I don’t really care about work in that situation, otherwise, I’m being paid to work here. I’ve defo told my supervisor how things are built more or less but yeah, should I need to put my 15 days I’ll prolly spend them teaching someone about it.
And that right there is why Windows is so entrenched.
If you want this for real, adoption of open source, then treat it properly. Consider the business impact of your absence, document the systems, train others, otherwise this is just another timebomb waiting to go off and with it any hope of weakening the Microsoft stranglehold on the company and its C-suite.
I’ve lost count of the number of such “projects” I’ve encountered in my professional career.
This is not doing anyone any favours, least of all yourself.
But I’m not looking to overthrow Microsoft. My jobs finding solutions to problems that get presented to me. Not considering the business impact of my absence, that’s more something for my manager.
Open source is a great thing and it’d be celebrated. Yes, I do believe if I were to switch everyone’s os with a visually identical Linux based one there’s probably very few people that’d actually notice.
But like, being able to use libresoftware whoever you need is an intrinsic part of it. Making documentation is perfectly fair and we do have a trove of manuals for everything business related.
The current way I’ve been selling open software it’s because it’s just better, not encumbered by “licensing” or fees; not full of arbitrary limitations. I’ll inform people that they have choices and 90% of the time they take the open source one. Yeah, making something last a decade takes work but I’d rather deal with the problems as they appear rather than just preempting everything.
To be honest, open source and documentation (plus, chatGPT correct answers) are way more coupled in some open sorce projects than Windows and all their magic tricks, error codes, and so on. The fact that there is some sort of commercial support that is bigger or better with proprietary software (generally speaking) is true and partially because of network effect. I do agree with you. But I think it depends on what are we comparing… e.g. Windows SQL server vs. Docker PostgreSQL. I rather stay with Postgres, since it runs all over the world.
Right until your PostgreSQL server goes down and you can’t call your IT department and have to start hunting for a contractor, find a budget, get it signed off by management and HR, then on-board the new staff member, that is, after you advertised the position, did job interviews, after first filtering through the 700 … or two, applications, each plausibly generated by a ChatGPT session. Give it something like six months in a big organisation, less in a nimble one.
Does an “entrenched” anything sound “nimble” to you?
That’s awesome! I hope your effort in innovation and budget optimizations get recognized!
