Author: Ben Cotton

Ben formerly led open source messaging at Docker and was the Fedora Program Manager. He is the author of Program Management for Open Source Projects. Ben is an Open Organization Ambassador and frequent conference speaker. His personal website is Funnel Fiasco.

2022-07-22

Program Management for Open Source Projects is here!

After a year and a half of work, I’m happy to say that Program Management for Open Source Projects is now available in its final form! You can buy the DRM-free ebook right now directly from The Pragmatic Bookshelf. If you want a paperback, U.S. customers can place a pre-order via Bookshop. It’s also available for pre-order on Amazon. Writing...

News

2022-07-21

Your bug tracker and you (SCaLE)

At SCaLE 19x, I presented “Your bug tracker and you.” This is an extended version of my SeaGL 2021 talk. For SeaGL, I said “I got it completely written and then realized that I had focused on entirely the wrong aspects and had to rewrite it.” Since my time slot at SCaLE is twice as long, you’ll get the parts...

Talks

2022-07-19

A quick intro to development methodologies

Just as there’s more than one way to pet a cat, there’s more than one way to develop software. At the risk of over-simplifying, you can consider two broad methodology categories: waterfall and agile. Strictly speaking, these are software development methodologies, not project management methodologies. You can plug any of them into your project management lifecycle. Over many projects, your...

Posts

2022-05-09

A picture is worth a thousand words

Sometimes following your own advice makes you realize that the advice is good. This is one such story.

Posts

2022-04-25

New resource: decision template

I added a new entry on the Duck Alignment Academy Resources page: a decision template. Use this template when you need to make a decision in the community. It provides a simple way to define the problem, the proposed solution, and the process for making the decision. Too often, decisions in open source communities become complicated because participants make incompatible...

Resources