Growing your project means doing less coding
Many open source projects start out as one, maybe two people writing code to solve some problem they have. Eventually, other people find it and also find it useful. The user base grows to a point where the original developers can’t keep up with questions, bug reports, and feature requests. It’s time to start growing the contributor base.
The moment you start adding more contributors, the less time you spend coding. The larger the project gets, the less time the leader spends writing code.
Why is that? More bug reports means more triage and testing. As you add contributors, you have to resolve disputes (both technical and interpersonal) between them. You have to plan — and coordinate — work on new features. As your project continues to grow, maybe you’re appearing on podcasts, giving talks at conferences, and doing other activities to promote the project. Maybe you have donations coming in and you need to deal with the accounting.
As the community grows, you become more of a coordinator than a doer. That’s okay; in fact, it’s very good. Thriving communities need active coordination. But it often comes as a surprise, and it’s not always what people had in mind when they started the project. Very few people who start writing a software project for fun look forward to the day when their hobby turns into an unpaid manager gig.
Thankfully, there are great resources out there. Two excellent books on the topic are Producing Open Source Software by Karl Fogel, which covers the technical decision aspects, and Program Management for Open Source Projects by yours truly, which is more about the coordination aspects.
But what if you don’t want to turn management into a hobby? You can delegate! Find other trusted leaders in your community with the skills and desire to help cover the areas that you don’t want to. Issue triage is a great way for people with general knowledge of your project to help. You can ask someone (or a rotating cast) to handle the program management/release management/etc coordination work. A steering committee can take on the overall leadership, including code of conduct enforcement.
The important thing to remember is that you can’t hide from the reality of these non-coding tasks. If you want to keep spending your time writing code, you need to recruit people to take on the rest. Just because you started the project, you don’t need to feel obligated to continue in the sole leadership role forever.
This post’s featured photo by Jungwoo Hong on Unsplash.
