Imagine a world where open source never caught on, where no one thought it’d be a good idea to make source code available to anyone. In this episode, we imagine this bizarre possibility. And we celebrate the open source tools and methodologies that got us where we are today.

Join us as we wrap up Season 1, an almost 30,000-foot view of how the open source world came to be. Next season, we’re zooming in and focusing on the epic struggles of today’s command line heroes.

Please let us know what you think of the show by providing a rating or review in Apple Podcasts. Drop us a line at redhat.com/commandlineheroes, we're listening...

The best and brightest took us to the moon with the computing power of pocket calculators. Now they’re taking us farther—and they’re doing it with the tech we’ve been talking about all season. Open source is taking us to Mars.

The Season 2 finale takes us to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Tom Soderstrom shares how much JPL has gained by embracing open source. Hila Lifshitz-Assaf explains that NASA is solving some of their greatest problems with open software and crowdsourcing. And Dan Wachspress describes how working with NASA means proprietary companies need to make some sacrifices—but they get to work on the most innovative projects in the world.

The explorers of the final frontier are choosing to work in the open—and Mars is their destination. What’s next?

And while this may mark the end of Season 2, it's not really goodbye because we still want to hear from you. Reach out to us at redhat.com/commandlineheroes—we'd love to hear what you thought of this season.

The 10x Coder is often positioned as a mythical developer who can always save the day. Saron and Clive investigate how much of that myth is grounded in truth.

Greg Sadetsky argues that coding is much like professional sports—some athletes are bound to be much better than those starting out. Brianna Wu and Bonnie Eisenman pick apart the myth by sharing how much they have had to clean up after supposed 10x Coders. Jonathan Solórzano-Hamilton recounts the story of "Rick," a self-proclaimed rockstar developer who assumed too much. And everyone considers the benefits of the 1x Coders—because what use is code without ideas and experiences to guide development?

If you want to read up on some of our research on 10x coders, you can check out all our bonus material over at redhat.com/commandlineheroes. Follow along with the episode transcript.

A mission to set the course of the world wide web in its early days. 10 days to get it done. The result? An indispensable language that changed everything.

JavaScript was the underdog that won against all odds. Clive Thompson recounts the browser wars and how much the fallout influenced the future of the internet. Charles Severance explains how JavaScript went from a last-minute moonshot to the default web development language. Michael Clayton confesses he, like many others, underestimated JavaScript. And Klint Finley describes a gloomy internet without it.

If you want to dive deeper into the story of JavaScript, head on over to redhat.com/commandlineheroes

We first mentioned JavaScript's story in Episode 2 of Season 2—and made a slight correction to the story in this episode.

To learn even more about those 10 days, check out the DevChat podcast interview with Brendan.

People never stop tinkering. Hardware hacking didn’t disappear after personal computers became mainstream. But it did change. A new generation of artists, designers, and activists are banding together to change the world—with open source hardware.

Hardware hacking used to be expensive and time-consuming. Adaptable microcontrollers are making tinkering much easier. But even as the barriers to entry started falling, the practices around selling hardware have continued to veer toward secrecy. Ayah Bdeir, Alicia Gibb, and Limor Fried are working to keep hardware open. These leaders share how they helped build the open source hardware movement, and navigated fierce disagreements to make engineering accessible to all.

If you want to read up on some of our research on open source hardware, you can check out all our bonus material over at redhat.com/commandlineheroes. You’ll find extra content for every episode. Follow along with the episode transcript.

It's the turn of the 21st century. Open source software is changing the tech landscape. But new patterns of work have now become necessary. Developers search for a revolutionary approach that will allow open source development to flourish. A group of developers convenes at a ski resort in Utah to craft such an approach. What emerges is a manifesto that changes everything.

Dave Thomas, one of the authors of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, brings us back to that now famous retreat where the agile revolution was first organized. Not everyone was as quick to sign on to this new approach, though, and in this episode, we hear why.

Read Ruha Devanesan's take on agile's ability to harness diversity here.

Please let us know what you think of the show by providing a rating or review in Apple Podcasts.

Drop us a line at redhat.com/commandlineheroes, we're listening...

Command Line Heroes is back for Season 3. We’re exploring the epic history of programming languages and how communities affect their development. We're talking Python, learning about JavaScript, and diving into Perl. And that’s just our “Hello, World” for Season 3.

The first episode drops June 25. Subscribe today and sign up for the newsletter. Head over to redhat.com/commandlineheroes to catch up on seasons 1 and 2. Check out all the additional content while you're there.

The year is 1995. The internet starts going mainstream and the dot-com bubble begins its rapid inflation. But 10 years before all of this, a small team of systems administrators made a seemingly simple decision that would turn out to have a monumental impact on these events and would set the course of the internet for the foreseeable future.

Dr. W. Joseph Campbell sets the stage for our season on the internet in 1995. Claire L. Evans explains how hard it was to find anything on the early internet. One team was charged with compiling that information in the early days of the ARPANET. Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler recounts being the internet’s sole librarian in those early days, and how she helped come up with the rules for future domain names. Paul Mockapetris describes designing the domain name system they later implemented as the internet went from a public network to a private business. And Ben Tarnoff explains the results of that increasingly privatized internet.

If you want to read up on some of our research on the domain name system (DNS), you can check out all our bonus material over at redhat.com/commandlineheroes.

Follow along with the episode transcript.