Perhaps the most well-known of open source bugs this year is heartbleed, notable as much for its marketing as technical merit.

There’s a tradition at work of decorating people’s cubes when they’re on sabbatical, and while I wasn’t the one who came up with the idea to decorate our fearless leader’s cube with things representing the many well-marketed open source bugs, I was the person who brought in the first piece:

There wasn’t exactly a pattern for this:
Step 1 Draw half a big heart (to make sure it’s symmetrical) and cut out two of them.
Step 2 Cut a long strip with tapered ends to go over the top (to give the pillow some extra width at the top — you can’t see it in the photo but it’s about the width of my palm).
Step 3 Cut various thinner strips to be the bleeding drips.
Step 4 Sew each side of top to tapered strip
Step 5 Carefully sew bottom of two hearts together, placing drips at appropriate intervals.
Step 6 Curse and pull out drips and re-sew so they actually hang correctly. Several times.
Step 7 Leave a hole so you can flip the thing right-side out and stuff, then curse because you have no red thread and spawn another search of the house because it’s much too late to go out and buy thread.

Since my office (and indeed, half of the house) had no floor, there was a lot of frantic searching for the sewing machine. I don’t mind free-handing a pattern, but sewing through 3 layers of polar fleece by hand isn’t my favourite activity! Thankfully, we did find the sewing machine, but in the end, the only red thread I could find came from a promotional sewing kit I got from Raytheon at some Grace Hopper Celebration past. Seems sort of hilariously appropriate.

End result: one very one-of-a-kind throw pillow.

I’m sort of surprised that no one has started marketing open source bug merchandise, to be honest. I’ll bet there’s a market!