Case study
Electric
A fast, cross-platform package manager in Rust for installing a variety of applications. Open-source contribution.
- Role
- Open source contributor
- Period
- 2020-11 → 2021-12
- Status
- Shipped
- Tags
- 4
Summary
Contributed to a Rust-based cross-platform package manager. Learned the package-installation problem space and what it takes to keep a CLI behaving correctly on macOS, Linux, and Windows.
What I built
Outsider contributions to the Electric CLI.
What was hard
Maintaining a CLI that has to behave correctly on macOS, Linux, and Windows. The same code path reads different filesystems, resolves different symlinks, and has different shell escape rules. Edge cases compound.
What's next
Electric continues to be maintained by the original project. My contributions are preserved in the project's history.
What I learned
Open source has a much longer feedback loop than I had expected. Patches take weeks to land even when they are small.