5 posts tagged “filippo-valsorda”
2025
Maintainers of Last Resort (via) Filippo Valsorda founded Geomys last year as an "organization of professional open source maintainers", providing maintenance and support for critical packages in the Go language ecosystem backed by clients in retainer relationships.
This is an inspiring and optimistic shape for financially sustaining key open source projects, and it appears be working really well.
Most recently, Geomys have started acting as a "maintainer of last resort" for security-related Go projects in need of new maintainers. In this piece Filippo describes their work on the bluemonday HTML sanitization library - similar to Python’s bleach which was deprecated in 2023. He also talks at length about their work on CSRF for Go after gorilla/csrf lost active maintenance - I’m still working my way through his earlier post on Cross-Site Request Forgery trying to absorb the research shared their about the best modern approaches to this vulnerability.
llm-fragments-go (via) Filippo Valsorda released the first plugin by someone other than me that uses LLM's new register_fragment_loaders() plugin hook I announced the other day.
Install with llm install llm-fragments-go and then:
You can feed the docs of a Go package into LLM using the
go:fragment with the package name, optionally followed by a version suffix.
llm -f go:golang.org/x/mod/sumdb/note@v0.23.0 "Write a single file command that generates a key, prints the verifier key, signs an example message, and prints the signed note."
The implementation is just 33 lines of Python and works by running these commands in a temporary directory:
go mod init llm_fragments_go
go get golang.org/x/mod/sumdb/note@v0.23.0
go doc -all golang.org/x/mod/sumdb/note
2024
Geomys, a blueprint for a sustainable open source maintenance firm (via) Filippo Valsorda has been working as a full-time professional open source maintainer for nearly two years now, accepting payments on retainer from companies that depend on his cryptography Go packages.
This has worked well enough that he's now expanding: Geomys (a genus of gophers) is a new company which adds two new "associate maintainers" and an administrative director, covering more projects and providing clients with access to more expertise.
Filipino describes the model like this:
If you’re betting your business on a critical open source technology, you
- want it to be sustainably and predictably maintained; and
- need occasional access to expertise that would be blisteringly expensive to acquire and retain.
Getting maintainers on retainer solves both problems for a fraction of the cost of a fully-loaded full-time engineer. From the maintainers’ point of view, it’s steady income to keep doing what they do best, and to join one more Slack Connect channel to answer high-leverage questions. It’s a great deal for both sides.
For more on this model, watch Filippo's FOSDEM talk from earlier this year.
2023
I’m Now a Full-Time Professional Open Source Maintainer. Filippo Valsorda, previously a member of the Go team at Google, is now independent and making a full-time living as a maintainer of various open source projects relating to Go. He’s managing to pull in an amount “equivalent to my Google total compensation package”, which is a huge achievement: the greatest cost involved in independent open source is usually the opportunity cost of turning down a big tech salary. He’s doing this through a high touch retainer model, where six client companies pay him to keep working on his projects and also provide them with varying amounts of expert consulting.