Duck Alignment Academy

2023-06-28

Separating announcements from discussion

The problem is rarely that the important information isn’t communicated. The problem is usually that people can’t find it.

Posts

2023-06-21

How to take meeting notes

If you know how to take good meeting notes, you can help make the meeting useful.

Posts

2023-06-14

Managing the attention budget

Contributors donate their precious time to your project. Make good use of it by managing the attention you require.

Posts

2023-06-07

How a company should stop participating in an open source project

When participation in a community no longer meets business goals, it’s common to leave. The key is to have a graceful withdrawal strategy.

Posts

2023-06-02

Is an accidentally reverted feature a release blocker?

You should have a policy in place, and it needs to be more sophisticated than “yes” or “no”. Decide when adding a feature if it should be release blocking or not.

Posts

2023-05-31

MVP applies to teams, too

It’s hard to contain your enthusiasm when starting something new, but you have to pace yourself. Otherwise, the enthusiasm goes nowhere.

Posts

2023-05-26

Chat is not documentation

Chat is somewhat ephemeral. When you try to use it as a long-term resource — even if you have years of logs — it gets rough.

Posts

2023-05-24

Just because you write it, that doesn’t mean they’ll read it

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. What happens if you write all of those wonderful words and they don’t get read?

Posts

2023-05-17

Are bug reporters contributors?

Whether they’re made by a contributor or not, bug reports are valuable contributions to your project. Treat them that way.

Posts

2023-05-12

Use your tools, but write like you

We live in a time when we’re awash in tools (often free) that aid writing. You miss out when you don’t take advantage of these tools.

Posts