Tag: advice

2023-08-30

Don’t try to guess contributor affiliations

When asked “how many $company employees contribute to this project?” the best answer is “I don’t know and there’s no good way to find out.”

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2023-08-09

Choosing between wiki- and git-based documentation

What should you choose for your documentation: a wiki or text files hosted in a git repo and rendered by another tool?

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2023-08-02

Be careful how you treat AI-looking posts

When you prohibit anything that you think is AI-generated, you can end up creating an unwelcoming environment.

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2023-06-21

How to take meeting notes

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

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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.

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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.

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2023-04-28

The solution isn’t interesting, the problem is

Nobody wants to use a computer. They want to get something done. Focusing on the problem instead of the solution gets you better results.

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2023-04-12

Embrace the non-judgmental “why?”

People don’t make bad decisions on purpose. If you understand why a decision was made in the past, you make better decisions for the future.

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2023-02-08

Write standard operating procedures

When you document how to execute a process, that ensures you’ll do it right the next time. This helps your future self and your successors.

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2022-01-19

Spreading the work with infrequent contributors

Over on The Pragmatic Programmers, I wrote an article about spreading the work fairly when you have infrequent contributors. This is a common issue in open source projects that have people who work on them as their full-time job. Contributors are the lifeblood of an open source community. You want to attract and retain people so that the project is...

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