We analyse contributor coordination in Kubernetes, a large open source project comparable in scale to a major enterprise software division. Over 11 years, 25,953 contributors created 46,768 issues and 339,332 comments, providing a complete record of collaboration rarely visible in proprietary settings. We examine how contributors organise themselves across technical domains and how coordination affects development outcomes. Our results show that collaboration is highly modular, with contributors interacting 42.9 times more often within domains than across them. Issues related to multiple domains take 4.19 times longer to resolve (due to both coordination complexity and issue difficulty), and coordination within the modules depends on a small subset of contributors. These findings demonstrate how large-scale coordination dependencies can be observed and quantified in open source development, offering a transferable tool for analyzing enterprise-scale software projects.

In recent years, blockchain technology has seen significant practical growth, yet it has not seen the same advancement from a theoretical perspective. This has led to the creation of numerous blockchains that are very different from each other and behave like isolated worlds. The research and development of theoretical frameworks, which define the fundamental properties of blockchains and define standards to follow for a more homogeneous implementation approach, have become extremely important. A theoretical model can help not only to design blockchains in the future but also to define a set of minimum requirements to be met for the creation of interoperability protocols between existing blockchains. In this work, we propose a theoretical model of blockchain that describes its most significant properties. Starting from our theoretical model, we present Smart Listeners , a blockchain interoperability protocol that finalises an inter-chain transaction with just two transactions: one on the source blockchain and one on the destination blockchain. The protocol is optimistic since changes on the source blockchain occur as if inter-chain transactions were successful. It is hybrid since it combines some properties of watchtowers and oracles in the off-chain components. We provide a benchmark on the performance of the proposed protocol in terms of latency and transactions per second. Finally, we define the minimum requirements that a blockchain should satisfy to allow the application of general-purpose interoperability protocols.

Context: Open-source software (OSS) development is often studied as a decentralized process driven by technical goals. However, mature OSS projects operate under external constraints such as security advisories, release deadlines, and ecosystem dependencies. These pressures shape technical decisions and also communication patterns among contributors, including emotional expression. Objective: This study investigates how emotional expression in OSS projects varies across different types of repositories, evolves over time, and relates to the activity of top contributors. The goal is to assess whether emotional dynamics are shaped more by project function than by technical domain or project size. Methods: We analyzed issue comments from 14 OSS repositories spanning over ten years. A transformer-based classifier was used to detect emotions. Emotional patterns were quantified using a composite Emotional Index, and contextual activity. Contributor roles were assessed using a Contribution Index combining code activity, discussion engagement, and sustained involvement. Analyses were conducted at the repository, temporal, and contributor levels. Results: The four most frequent emotions across all repositories were gratitude, curiosity, confusion, and approval. Emotional patterns tend to cluster by functional role rather than technical domain, with repositories converging toward stable emotional profiles over time. High-impact contributors show distinct expression patterns that reflect their role and stage of engagement. Conclusion: Emotional expression in OSS projects follows recurring patterns linked to project function, contributor roles, and maturity. These findings can help anticipate communication challenges during project evolution and support interaction strategies among contributor groups with differing emotional tendencies.

We analyze developer activity across 10 major Ethereum repositories (totaling 129884 commits, 40550 issues) spanning 10 years to examine how events such as technical upgrades, market events, and community decisions impact development. Through statistical, survival, and network analyses, we find that technical events prompt increased activity before the event, followed by reduced commit rates afterwards, whereas market events lead to more reactive development. Core infrastructure repositories like Go-Ethereum exhibit faster issue resolution compared to developer tools, and technical events enhance core team collaboration. Our findings show how different types of events shape development dynamics, offering insights for project managers and developers in maintaining development momentum through major transitions. This work contributes to understanding the resilience of development communities and their adaptation to ecosystem changes.

Blockchain technology faces significant challenges related to sustainability, including issues with optimisation, as well as high energy and gas consumption—factors that developers may sometimes neglect. We introduce a methodology to analyse the key sustainability topics discussed by Go-Ethereum developers, using thematic analysis of their issues and comments from Github. Our approach uses the BERT model to conduct an in-depth topic analysis, enabling us to study the underlying themes and trends in developer’s conversations regarding energy use and sustainability. We assess the sustainability of the identified topics using the five dimensions outlined in the Sustainability Awareness Framework (SusAF): economic, social, individual, environmental, and technical. Our goal is to shed light on how much attention developers pay to sustainability and energy consumption issues. The findings from this qualitative analysis aim to encourage technologists to incorporate these considerations into their future projects, in order to achieve better outcomes in terms of sustainability and reduced consumption.

Nowadays, blockchain technology and smart contracts (SCs) spread as hot computer science and finance topics, catching the interest of a heterogeneous range of users. Thinking about blockchain technologies, users can choose between a broad set of alternatives, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric, Cardano, and many others. The choice of a blockchain platform over another relies on the user’s purpose. For what concerns smart contracts programming, Ethereum is still the most popular platform despite other popular blockchain technologies recently increasing their popularity for SCs development, such as Algorand, Stellar, Hyperledger Fabric, and many others. Such a tremendous number of alternatives makes it difficult to keep track of blockchain trends and use cases of the different technologies. This work explores users’ most discussed topics and opinions about popular blockchain technologies, focusing on smart contracts development, taking advantage of topic modeling techniques, and in particular, taking advantage of the BERT model. The primary data source is Reddit, which was proven to provide different and exciting blockchain topics. The chosen blockchain platform are four of the most popular platforms for SCs development. These technologies include Ethereum, Stellar, Algorand, and Hyperledger Fabric. The analysis of 14.156 sub-reddits highlighted several exciting topics, such as smart contracts auditing, currency inflation, comparisons between crypto, and general blockchain trends. The most present arguments concern Stellar trends, comparisons between Stellar and Ripple, which Wallet to use to store tokens and crypto, SCs auditing, and Ethereum trends.