Background

When I worked at Tencent Opensource Program Office and the Linux Foundation, I realized the importance of tech culture to a company and how hard it is to adapt to a new tech culture once the company is big enough: frontline engineers need to work with the right tech stack and be inclusive to the community; mid-level managers need to include open-source metrics in their KPI/OKR; high-level executive need to see the strategic value of being culturally-advanced. Being open-source is not about collecting Github stars or doing a spotlight speech. The real journey starts after you uploading the source code. The real challenge is the open governance: how to build a transparent and effective dev cycle with the community?

I always keep those questions and challenges in mind when building Jina AI an OSS company. Having an open and inclusive tech culture from the very beginning is important to us.

Table of Contents

Join our All Hands Meeting

Starting from next week, we will host the Engineering All Hands of Jina AI in public. This Zoom meeting recurs monthly on the second Tuesday, 14:00-15:30 (CET). Everyone can join in via the following calendar invite.



The meeting will also be live-streamed and later published to our Youtube channel. Make sure to subscribe it if you want to watch the replay.

Content & Form

Our engineering team and I will be there. I will be the host. The 90-min meeting aims to solve hard-core engineering questions such as:

  • Why is this API implemented in this way?
  • Can this feature/app be done with the current API?
  • Is there a way to optimize this part of the code?
  • Am I doing this right?
  • What is the implication of the recent breaking changes?
  • How do we want to proceed with this feature?
  • What are the best practices when developing Jina?
  • How is this issue related to a story/epic/vision in our roadmap?

Note, questions mentioned above come not only from the in-house engineers, but also from the community, especially the external contributors and enthusiasts of Jina AI. If you have any engineering questions that fit into this meeting, we are happy to answer them.

Unlike other one-way presentations, I will not prepare slides for this meeting. Instead, I’m expecting the participants to prepare questions, code snippets and (not-)working examples, the more details the better. My role here is to answer your call and clarify the technical blockers. You can expect heavy whiteboard programming, code reviewing, and literature sharing.

Towards Open Governance

Open source = Open “source code” + Open governance

When I say we will build Jina AI as the leading open-source company, I mean it, and I will do it right from day one. Having a public Engineering All Hands is not only a step towards open governance but also sets the tone of our tech culture. If you believe in what we believe, then come and join the meeting. Let’s build the neural search ecosystem together!