What have I been writing when I haven’t been writing here?
Stuff I wrote
Duck Alignment Academy
Fork yes: embrace forks of your project — If you’ve done what you can to make your community a great place to contribute, then you can feel free to embrace any forks that happen.
Keep your bug tracker unified — When your bug tracking is scattered across different platforms, you make it harder for your users to file reports.
Semantic versioning in large projects — SemVer can work for large projects, but it’s not a fit for every case. Whatever you pick, document it clearly.
Grow by delegating — Don’t hoard responsibility. Give new contributors a sense of ownership so that they’ll stick around your community.
Nearly 10 months to the day since the last time this happened, I was informed yesterday that my position has been eliminated. As before, it’s unrelated to my performance, but the end result is the same: I am looking for a new job.
So what am I looking for? The ideal role would involve leadership in open source strategy or other high-level work. I’m excited by the opportunities to connect open source development to business goals in a way that makes it a mutually-beneficial relationship between company and community. In addition to my open source work, I have experience in program management, marketing, HPC, systems administration, and meteorology. You know, in case you’re thinking about clouds. My full resume (also in PDF) is available on my website.
If you have something that you think might be a good mutual fit, let me know. In the meantime, you can buy Program Management for Open Source Projects for all of your friends and enemies. I’m also available to give talks to communities (for free) and companies (ask about my reasonable prices!) on any subject where I have expertise. My website has a list of talks I’ve given, with video when available.
Don’t try to be too formal in policy writing — Don’t emulate legal language when writing policies for your community. The simpler the language, the easier everyone will understand.
Companies: fund work that isn’t new development — Failing to invest in your upstream projects presents a large business risk. Communities, like gardens, are more productive when tended to.
How to get started in project management — Do you want to get started in project management but you’re not sure how? Open source projects have plenty of opportunity to jump in & help.
On Christmas morning, I put my Canon EOS T1i DSLR camera on the tripod to take a family picture. But it didn’t work: “Err05”. The built-in flash didn’t open, so the camera refused to…camera. It had done that at Thanksgiving, too, so I’d used manual settings and some additional lighting to make it work. This time, changing the ISO from automatic was enough to convince the camera to take a picture, but I didn’t want to keep fighting it. Search results suggested that it could be dirt in the flash housing. Makes sense: I took the camera to the beach this summer and we all know that sand is coarse and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere.
I found a great YouTube video that went through the process of removing the housing and cleaning the flash. Just from loosening the screw a bit, the flash popped up when it was supposed to. But I figured “since I’m here, I might as well keep going and make sure I have everything cleaned out.” That was my mistake.
When it came time to reassemble everything, I couldn’t figure out how the spring fit. The guy in the video just said to put it back and his fingers blocked my view. I couldn’t find anything else, except for a few forum posts that were impossible for me to decipher. I spent what felt like an hour trying different things and growing increasingly frustrated. But at one point I turned the camera just right and I figured it out.
Replacing the spring
It turns out there’s a slit on the interior part of the housing where you can slide the short end of the spring. It will hold there firmly after you bend the long part back to install the screw.
One the screw is back in (note that the head is smaller than the coil of the spring), you can hook the long end under the tab on the forward part of the housing.
I hope this helps anyone who stumbles across this post in a fit of desperation. The YouTube video is very helpful otherwise, so I won’t repeat the rest. I’ve only tried these instructions on one model of camera, because that’s the only one I have, but it should be the same for similar models.
Oh hey, it’s been almost two years since my last update. Chalk it up to a busy life and a national lack of interest that resulted in less to talk about. The data I used to create my Indiana COVID-19 dashboard is no longer updated, so the dashboard is also no longer updated. I’ll leave it up for historical reference.
By the end of the third year of the pandemic, we’ve still not managed to keep people from dying of COVID-19 in Indiana. July 2023 was consistently at or near zero, but the daily deaths have been rising since. We’ve had, on average, about four per day in the last 2–3 months. But the state no longer feels the need to track that data.
Still, our death toll has been far lower than in years past.
The same can’t be said for hospitalizations. When the state stopped taking a daily census on May 24 of this year, we had consistently been higher in 2023 than at the same time in 2022.
But I guess COVID is over now. Or at least we’re pretending like it is. Just this morning, my wife and one of our kids tested positive. It’s the 1,375th day of March 2020.
New project repo basics — Before you start writing any code, what do you fill a new repo with? I’ve created a sample repository with some really basic examples.
It’s okay for your project to end — Open source projects don’t last forever, and that’s okay. The end of a project can be a sign of success, or at least partial success.
Earlier this month, Sentry announced a new software license called the “Functional Source License.” The announcement has a tagline “Freedom without Free-riding”. It purports to address some of the issues with the Business Source License.
An improvement?
It does, in fact, address some issues with the Business Source License. The Business Source License is less of a license and more of a homework problem for a combinatorics class. It has many options that materially change the terms, so being told that software is under the Business Source License doesn’t tell you much. The Functional Source License has one choice: does the license change to the Apache Software License or the MIT license?
While the Functional Source License does reduce complexity, it still suffers from the same problem: it’s not open source. That’s not a problem in itself; it’s a problem because it tries to co-opt the well-known “open source” label without actually being open source. Ultimately, these are attempts to use a license to address a business model problem. As we all should know by now, open source is not a business model.
The “right” approach
I’ve seen some people ask “then what’s the right approach?” The answer depends on what it is you want to do.
If you’re trying to achieve ubiquity, make the source fully closed and give it away to people who aren’t going to pay you money anyway. Or go with a “freemium” or “open core” model.
If you want your users to see the code so that they can trust it, then just make it source-available. This doesn’t make a lot of sense in a software-as-a-service context (which is what the Functional Source License is geared toward) because the user has no way of knowing that the code they’re inspecting is that the code you’re running.
If you want to get community contributions, use an open source license. Otherwise, you’re the free rider. A copyleft license won’t prevent competitors from building a product on your software, but it does prevent them from keeping their changes to themselves.
Does your project say “no” enough? — Saying “no” well keeps your project is focused & maintainable. This may put some people off, but it helps your project stay healthy long-term.
Directing new contributors to areas of need — If you have a list of what your project needs & empower people to do them, you’ll find newcomers self-direct to the best contributions.
Managing issue tracker labels — Labels are arbitrary tags that either apply to an issue or not. But how you use them in your project can get very complicated.
Technically We Write
Git for writing documentation — Technical writers can use Git to collaborate on documentation, such as for open source software projects. These are the basics.
What have I been writing when I haven’t been writing here?
Stuff I wrote
Duck Alignment Academy
One approach to AI contributions — All communities will need an AI contribution policy at some point, and the Apache Software Foundation’s example is a good one to follow.
What are you optimizing? — If you start optimizing for a process and then discover you’re optimizing for the wrong thing, you’ve wasted time.
For companies, community should be “us” not “them” — Referring to the community as “them” as if there’s no overlap encourages treating company & community interests as separate, harming long-term sustainability.
New logo! — Almost two years after I meant to get around to it, Duck Alignment Academy has a logo.
Preparing for Hacktoberfest contributors — If your project is participating In Hacktoberfest, you’ll want to make sure you’re ready for an influx of new contributors.