How to Grow Open-Source Contributors and Maintainers

I found it annoyingly non-trivial to add a spell checker to this blog. For now, I settled on GitHub Spellcheck Action that uses PySpelling on files changed in the commit or pull request as described in this blog post. name: Check Spelling on: [push, pull_request] jobs: check: runs-on: ubuntu-latest steps: - uses:...

Since my first day in AWS 5 1/2 years ago, I’ve been experimenting with keeping a CHANGELOG of everything I do, available for everyone at the company to see. I wrote about it here. If you work at AWS, use the URL in the screenshot below to find it. I wrote a little script to try and classify where I spent my time. Here are some quick, very...

Have you watched The IT Crowd? It’s a hilarious British television sitcom from around 2006 that cast a bunch of IT geniuses at the Reynholm Industries tech support department in London. One of the signature laughs is that every time the phone rang, Roy would pick it up and without waiting say “Have you turned it off and on again?”, then hang up....

Every active open-source project grows a lot of low hanging fruit. Encouraging project users to harvest some of the yield can be a great way to engage and retain new contributors. Here are some ideas, mostly borrowed from Barani, for low-hanging work items that you can propose to anyone engaging in your project. Help Wanted, Good First Issue and...

I’ve previously written about the OpenSearch OpenAPI Specification and how it can be used to fix bugs in the OpenSearch documentation. Most of the tests in the API spec work with a generic Docker container and some basic network setup to expose a local 9200 port. version: '3' services: opensearch-cluster: image:...