We're big fans of open source, so we like to give back to the community whenever we can. Having a strong community is actually personally and professionally selfish: a vibrant community not only helps ensure we keep getting to eat on a regular basis, but it also means there is more useful code available for us to use.
Neither Jacob nor myself would be in the position we're in if it wasn't for the open source community. So even though we're a small company, in 2011 we're trying to really step up the ways we give back to the community.
Office Hours
We'll be holding another one of our IRC "office hours" in #revsys on Freenode this coming Friday, February 4th, from 3-5pm Central. We held our first a few months ago and it was not only successful, but fun so we're doing it again. We hope to have enough time to do this at least a few times a year.
Sponsoring PyCon
Where would we be without Python? Sure we could have spent this money on a new hot tub for the office, or perhaps adding another runway to the RevSys HQ airstrip, but we figured helping PyCon be awesome might be a better use of our money. So we signed up as a sponsor, joining some other great companies (and few of our clients).
Sponsoring readthedocs.org
It's no secret that we're huge documentation nerds. We've been really enjoying the Sphinx documentation toolkit, so we were super excited when we saw Read the Docs launch after the 2010 DjangoDash. If you haven't checked it out, you really should: It makes it trivial to setup a spot on the web for your docs. It even gives you free searching and doc versions based on tags in your repository.
We think this is a great project that Eric, Charles, and Bobby put together, so when they approached us to help cover their server costs we said "hell yes." We're looking forward to the new features they're working on, and we're honored to be able to help out.
