Meeting Open Source Users Where They Are

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 been very active in open source since around 2008 and have become very passionate about growing contributors and maintainers in the projects I am involved in. The health of an open-source project can easily be measured by the number of actively engaged participants in its code, which cannot happen without maintainers. Maintainers are leaders...