About a year ago some friends and I started meeting up monthly in a Google hangout to explore the internals of open source software we use everyday. Our motivations were simple: know our tools inside and out, learn from the works of better hackers than ourselves, and hopefully get a jumpstart on contributing to the repos we love.

At first we treated the hangouts like a study group, but the sessions quickly evolved into one person preparing in advance and guiding the rest of the group through what they had discovered. Then one day, the authors of PolymerJS showed up to take part as we were dissecting their code (thank you, Twitter!). Around the same time, we had been getting requests to record the sessions for folks who couldn't make it.

Eventually, we put two and two together and realized we ought to invite open source authors to read us their own works, broadcast live and recorded for posterity. What a great way to learn to write kick-ass code, pave the way for new contributors to a given project, and spread our enthusiasm for all things FOSS!

We're now promoting and archiving these hangouts at http://readthesource.io. Last week we had Scott Corgan guide us through Superstatic, the static file server behind Divshot.com. On October 16th at 12:30 Pacific, Chris Matthieu and the Octoblu team will give us an inside look at Meshblu, a machine-to-machine instant messaging network and API that powers the Internet of Things (formerly known as SkyNet.im).

We have a few more unannounced hangouts in the pipeline and we're actively looking for more guests. Our intention is to continue covering both popular projects and not-so-well-known, but uniquely interesting ones. In the mean time, we'd love to get your take on the general concept as well as our execution.

Thanks HN!

I've learned a ton tuning into Read the Source. We're all responsible for at least making an effort to understand the tools we're using. Reading the source is a good start.