Introducing our OSS maintainer, Greg Furman

For Day 5 of our launch week, we're excited to introduce Greg Furman, our open-source maintainer. Hatchet is open-source and 100% MIT-licensed, and we have an active open-source community that Greg leads, both on GitHub and in our Discord channel.

We asked Greg a few questions to help the broader Hatchet community get to know him better. Here's what he said:

What gets you excited about OSS?

"There's a Milton Friedman bit about a pencil that I keep coming back to: the idea that no single person could make one, because it depends on the work of thousands who've never met, don't share a language, and may have little else in common. I kind of view open source development in the same way.

Engineers across the world, different cultures and backgrounds, coming together to build something meaningful, and the network effects that emerge from that are pretty hard to replicate elsewhere!

I've also found that open-source projects tend to have very tight feedback loops. There's something really motivating about hearing directly from the people using what you've built."

What was your first impression of Hatchet when you discovered it?

"I was first introduced to Hatchet in a Show HN post in 2024 and the moment I saw a "It uses Postgres for the underlying queue" I was sold!"

What made you want to go deeper than just being a user?

"While my previous work never really required a distributed task queue like Hatchet, the (frankly, rare) opportunity to help build out something novel in the distributed systems space meant I was pretty determined to get involved as a contributor.

I've been writing software for software engineers for the past few years and really appreciate the craft behind tools like this. You start to notice when something is genuinely well built - and Hatchet is."

What makes a great open-source contributor, in your experience?

"That's an easy one: empathy! From my experience, great open-source contributors have a deep empathy for both the maintainers of the project and the users of the software.

I think this is also why we'd find that many users of a project make for great contributors, since I believe they have empathy for the end user (given that they're one themselves!)."

Where would you love more help from the community right now?

"What I'd especially love to see more of is people just reporting friction. I think some users hit a wall getting set up, find a workaround, and move on without ever telling us. Even just opening a ticket is hugely valuable (bonus points if you open a PR!).

While not the traditional feature work, these types of additions really move the needle on velocity. There's a whole category of unglamorous-but-impactful contributions that I think get overlooked but are VITAL to a project's success."

What does a thriving Hatchet OS community look like a year from now?

"I think Hatchet becoming a go-to tool across the ecosystem would be a clear signal that we're thriving, especially when we start seeing it picked up by and used in other open-source projects.

What I'd love to see is the full community engineering cycle playing out on its own - issues, discussions, PRs - without our team having to be the ones driving them. With that said, we're already starting to see this, which is super exciting!"