Category: Posts

2025-03-19

Facilitating decisions is more important than making them

You cannot decide on behalf of the community. Facilitating decisions is how you build a community that wants to stick around.

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2025-03-12

Helping your project survive the loss of core contributors

Only 27% of projects that lose their core developers survive, but you can take steps to give your project its best chance.

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2025-03-05

Rules and policies are necessary to define good behavior

Think of it this way: having rules and policies for behavior in your community is like documenting the community’s API.

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2025-02-26

Every project is a software project

It’s a good reminder that our audience is broader than we might think and we should act accordingly.

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2025-02-19

Improvement requires context

If you swoop in uninformed, you might make some correct decisions, but you’ll probably make more wrong ones.

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2025-02-12

Prioritizing your work with the Eisenhower Matrix

The Eisenhower Matrix is a simple framework for prioritizing your tasks by determining a task’s importance and urgency.

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2025-02-05

Open source projects don’t exist separately from the outside world

You do your community a disservice when you treat open source as a noble pursuit that’s separate from the noise of daily life.

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2025-01-29

CalVer is many schemes

You need to clearly indicate how you identify your releases. Simply saying “CalVer” does not set clear expectations for your users.

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2025-01-22

Prioritizing work in the project with the MoSCoW method

The MoSCoW method is a simple, easy-to-use method for prioritizing work by putting into one of four categories.

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2025-01-15

The “O” in “FOSS” does not stand for “obligation”

We need to motivate the behavior we want to see instead of being upset when it doesn’t happen.

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