Bootstrap goes open source
Today we have decided to open source one of our projects – Bootstrap. It’s a small application to demonstrate how to use AngularJS with Scalatra, based on the Scala language. You can find more about the technology stack in the project readme.
What is it?
Bootstrap is a showcase application to present many different features and mostly re-used patterns. It’s also an archetype project which can be used as a starting point for the development of a real application. It’s main goal is to show to the customer a working application in two weeks. This project is not only a source code, but much more – read further :)
As a business I want to …
If you are looking for a partner to help you build a dedicated solution for your business, you can consider our approach. Bootstrap was (and still is) created with one main goal in mind: allow to show the customer working application in just two weeks. You can say it’s not a problem, we can do it even faster – yes, probably you’re right – but the source code is not enough. Behind the source code there must be the whole infrastructure, procedures and a way of doing things. Bootstrap enables you to deliver all of this within a very short time. Your potential client gets convinced that your are able to develop the product he needs and it’s a perfect starting point for a detailed specification.
As a developer I want to …
So, I’m a developer, is there anything for me?
Of course, you can learn a lot, you can always ask us for help, to explain why we did that this way, why we used this or that library. As well you can help us improve the code base, you can show us a better solution to solve given issue. You can also contribute, it’s quite easy with GitHub – fork and prepare a pull request – for sure we will take it under consideration with next iteration planning 
If you’re looking for a new job, it can also be a nice way to show us what you can do with your fingers. We’re looking for great coders and strong agilers – because as I said – code is not enough 
Why have we open sourced it?
You can wonder why have we decided to open source it? Why do we want to give away for free few weeks of our hard work? Have we gone crazy? Not yet. That was the plan from the beginning. We support OSS in many different ways – take a look at our SoftwareMill Common library and others. You can find us involved in many open source projects as we want to contribute back to the community.
Feel free to clone the project and start playing with it – the source code is on GitHub.
Next steps
What we present here is just the top of the development process – behind it, there is a continuous integration process, such as how to setup it up in a fast and efficient way. A new build of the application is started on each commit to the source code repository. It’s also a testing approach, with dedicated tester – you may believe it or not, but each feature is tested by our QA engineer – in a simple showcase application.
As we’re an Agile company, we use Scrum methodology to drive each of our projects. We’re using Scrum on a daily basis and each day we’re trying to improve it as our goal is to deliver a real business value to our customers.
Bootstrap is just another step in this improvement process and feel invited to use it, as well as to contribute to the development of it.
