Some best practices for encouraging a healthy, sustainable open source environment, whether you're a casual user, contributor or maintaining your own project. From a Devmonth talk in Toronto, April 15 2016.
ADDITIONAL READING
All the content in here comes from watching and learning from others. These links are great additional reading on this topic, and I recommend following all of these authors' work.
[1] http://writing.jan.io/2015/11/20/sustainable-open-source.html
[2] https://medium.com/the-javascript-collection/healthy-open-source-967fa8be7951
[3] https://medium.com/code-zen/how-to-maintain-a-successful-open-source-project-aaa2a5437d3a#.6t77ivt8w
[4] http://docs.writethedocs.org/writing/beginners-guide-to-docs/
[5] http://www.kennethreitz.org/essays/be-cordial-or-be-on-your-way (thanks @the_compiler for the heads up!)
Josh Matthews (@lastontheboat) also mentioned OpenHatch and Issuehub.io as great resources for contributing to open source. Thanks Josh!
Thanks to André Arko for sharing the story of RubyGems.org with me. If you're a Ruby developer or company, Ruby Together (http://rubytogether.org) is a great community model for supporting Ruby infrastructure.
FOOTNOTES
Slides 4 and 5: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5139583
Slide 12: https://twitter.com/jedwatson/status/679878484634644482
Slide 14: https://github.com/audreyr/cookiecutter/issues/651
Slide 15: https://m.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/2u8tqp/psa_repl_by_default_opens_port_the_world_no/
Slide 18: https://medium.com/the-javascript-collection/healthy-open-source-967fa8be7951
Slide 20: https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt/issues/1403
Slide 24: http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/index.html
Slide 25: https://github.com/bower/bower/pull/2071
Slide 26: https://github.com/fabric/fabric/issues/1409
Slide 27: https://twitter.com/mperham/status/717092048902303744
Slide 34: Quote from Dan Katz http://www.scientific-computing.com/news/news_story.php?news_id=2759
Slide 35: https://github.com/plataformatec/simple_form
Slide 36: hood.ie/contribute
Slide 37: https://twitter.com/mikeal/status/713393409474465792/photo/1
4. @nayafia
Hi everyone, a full post-mortem is coming, but here's what happened from my perspective.
I got mentioned on twitter about this thread while I was on the bus. I asked @evanphx
to put the site into maintenance mode immediately.
Just a general PSA, please, if you find an issue like this, be nice. Tell the maintainers
privately. Don't post to Reddit, HN, or a public Gist. RubyGems.org is completely
volunteer run. No one gets paid to work on it. Thanks for your patience everyone.
-- @qrush (HN)
5. @nayafia
Nick. I don’t support today's PoC, I don't, really. But I told you. Twice in a week.
I feel deeply sad now.
--blambeau (HN)
Yes, and thanks for telling us. Really, we should have disabled gem pushes immediately.
Hindsight is 20/20, and I'm not sure why I didn't think of doing so earlier. The pain of not
being able to push gems would have forced us to fix it.
I'm sorry about this. I don't know what else to say. I wish we didn't have to deal with this
kind of problem in the Ruby community.
--qrush (HN)
18. @nayafia
“Every person who...comment[s] on an issue or submit[s]
code is a member of a project’s community. Just being
able to see them means that they have crossed the line
from being a user to being a contributor.”
Node.js contributor definition
