2024-03-27 License changes are API changes Making a license change affects how people interact with your project. You need to treat license changes as if they were changes to your API. Categories Posts
2024-03-22 No task is too small to track if that’s what it takes to get it done When in doubt, add the task. It’s better to track unnecessarily than to not track something important. Categories Posts
2024-03-20 Roadmaps are valuable for open source projects The moment you go from one contributor to two, you have to start coordinating. The project roadmap is an excellent tool for that. Categories Posts
2024-03-15 Plan for what happens after your project is done Your open source project will end one day. That’s okay. But you should think about what will happen with your project after it’s done. Categories Posts
2024-03-13 Coopetition: open source projects working together The Apereo Foundation invited me to speak at their Micro Conference Series. Abstract: Collaboration is a key part of open source projects, and that includes collaborating with other communities. Open source projects can work with their upstreams, downstreams, and even their competition. But how do you do it well? This presentation draws from the experiences of the Fedora and openSUSE... Categories Posts
2024-03-13 Bug fixes only matter if they get to the user Any bug that blocks a release from getting to users is worthy of an immediate fix release. This is true even if the bug is minor by itself. Categories Posts
2024-03-08 Should you care about GitHub stars? When I read Emily Omier’s post “I don’t care about your GitHub stars“, my first response was total agreement. Dopamine doesn’t show up on the balance sheet, after all. Of course, Emily is looking at it through a lens of building a company. It’s a perfectly valid perspective, but it’s not the only one. In (I think) a LinkedIn comment,... Categories Posts
2024-03-06 Conway’s Law applies to your documentation, too In order to keep your documentation from falling into the Conway trap, you have to actively curate it across the entire project. Categories Posts
2024-03-01 Incentives power open source A company making requests of a project has to explain the incentives in a way the project members will care, not in a way the company cares. Categories Posts
2024-02-28 Grow by delegating Don’t hoard responsibility. Give new contributors a sense of ownership so that they’ll stick around your community. Categories Posts