The challenges of maintaining a popular open-source project

In this talk, I give an insight into what it means to maintain a popular project for me personally, what it involves and what we as a community can do to help out and finally why I think it’s an important discussion to have.

Cookiecutter is a command-line utility that creates projects from templates. It is free and open-source software distributed under the terms of a permissive BSD-3 license. With around 180 individual contributors, more than 1000 public templates on GitHub alone, and multiple talks at conferences, it is fair to say that there is a small community around it.

But who are the people behind the project and what is it that they are doing?

It’s been three years since I was granted the commit bit by the core team. I have learned a lot about FOSS communities and also about myself. At times I struggle with balancing my day job as a full-time Software Engineer and maintaining Cookiecutter and other FOSS projects in my spare time. By now I’m OK with not responding to issues immediately and closing pull requests. However it took me quite a while to get to this point.

Maintaining FOSS projects can be incredibly rewarding and fun, but it can also be quite frustrating. It involves so much more than writing code or merging PRs, and yet sometimes it feels like that’s what most people think. The goal of this talk is to start a conversation around this topic and hear what other EuroPython attendees think about it and their challenges as contributors or maintainers.

https://ep2018.europython.eu/conference/talks/the-challenges-of-maintaining-a-popular-open-source-project

Transcript

1. The challenges of maintaining a popular open-source project EuroPython 2018 — July 27, 2018 Raphael Pierzina
2. Thanks to the organizers and volunteers for a great event! !
3. $ whoami
4. • Maintainer and core developer of pytest and Cookiecutter and related projects • I also write, speak, and tweet about these and other open source projects • I currently live in Berlin, Germany and work as a Senior Test Engineer for Firefox at Mozilla
5. https://raphael.codes/
6. @hackebrot
8. Agenda 1. Maintaining a popular open-source project 2. Challenges of a growing community 3. Frustrations for maintainers 4. Take-aways for maintainers @hackebrot
9. Maintaining a popular open-source project
10. @hackebrot
11. Cookiecutter • Command-line utility that creates projects from templates • Project templates can be in any programming language or markup format • Cross-platform: Windows, Mac, and Linux are officially supported • Works with CPython 2.7, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6 and PyPy @hackebrot
12. https://github.com/audreyr/ cookiecutter @hackebrot
13. Community • Free and open-source software: permissive BSD-3 license • 180 individual contributors from around the world • More than 1000 public templates on GitHub • Multiple talks at community conferences @hackebrot
14. Templates • https://github.com/audreyr/cookiecutter-pypackage • https://github.com/pydanny/cookiecutter-django • https://github.com/pytest-dev/cookiecutter-pytest-plugin • … @hackebrot
15. Contributing • Development of Cookiecutter is community-driven • Connect with other Cookiecutter contributors and users on Gitter • Everyone is invited to contribute! @hackebrot
20. My contributions • Created and published several Cookiecutter templates • Converted the test suite from unittest to pytest • Helped users with problems on the issue tracker and chat • Reviewed pull requests from other contributors @hackebrot
21. My contributions • Developed a number of features and bug fixes • Created poyo to overcome installation issues of YAML parsers • Created jinja2-time to make it easier to retrieve the current time • Created pytest-cookies to make testing templates easier @hackebrot
22. Cookiecutter @hackebrot
23. pytest-cookies @hackebrot
24. jinja2-time @hackebrot
25. poyo @hackebrot
26. Becoming a maintainer • Was granted the commit bit by the core team • Started managing releases on GitHub and pushing to PyPI • Continued to develop bug fixes and new features @hackebrot
27. Being a maintainer • Review pull requests and triage issues • Speak about Cookiecutter at EuroPython, PyData and local user groups • Explored various ways of getting funding for Cookiecutter • … @hackebrot
28. Emails
29. Challenges of a growing community
30. Community • Cookiecutter attracts users at a faster rate than contributors • Cookiecutter attracts contributors at a faster rate than people, who have the desire and time available to maintain the project • Thousands of users, hundreds of contributors, 5 maintainers @hackebrot
31. Learnings: Community • Make your project easier to contribute to • Adopt a Code of Conduct and enforce it • Have empathy towards others and yourself • Write good documentation • Lead by example @hackebrot
32. Project scope • People use your software in ways in which you might not have intended or anticipated, but they are still valid use cases • Newcomers encounter problems with Cookiecutter templates and create issues on the Cookiecutter issue tracker @hackebrot
33. Learnings: Project scope • Encourage building tools on top of your project • Ask contributors to develop automated tests and write documentation for new features in the same pull request • Write documentation describing the project and its scope @hackebrot
34. Breaking changes • Maintaining backwards compatibility becomes increasingly important • All changes must be carefully considered and thoroughly reviewed • Releases to PyPI, Conda, Mac Homebrew, Debian, … @hackebrot
35. Learnings: Breaking changes • Be careful about adding new features • Test your projects for supported Python versions and platforms • Write documentation describing the project and its scope • Say “NO” @hackebrot
36. Workflows • Asynchronous communication makes it difficult to make decisions • We established guidelines for merging code to ensure new code is maintainable, idiomatic Python, tested and documented • Lack of tools for maintainers on GitHub @hackebrot
37. Learnings: Workflows • Set up meetings on IRC/Gitter/Slack or video calls for discussions that are hard to have over email or GitHub issue comments • Document decisions made in a GitHub issue or the documentation • Work towards making yourself redundant • Reach out to other maintainers and suggest product enhancements @hackebrot
38. Maintainers are humans too • Maintainers are humans and volunteer their free time to lead the project • They don’t always have a time or resources to dedicate to the project • Every maintainer had their own reasons and motivations for taking on that responsibility and they might have changed over time @hackebrot
39. Learnings: Maintainers are humans too • Stick to best-practices, use automated testing and code checks, add automation and integrations • Document the process of bringing on new maintainers and guidelines for reviewing and merging changes • Do not tolerate toxic and abusive behavior from community members! @hackebrot
40. Expectations • Managing expectations is really hard! @hackebrot
41. Learnings: Expectations • Write documentation for different audiences @hackebrot
42. #WriteTheDocs
43. Frustrations for maintainers
44. Bike-shedding @hackebrot
45. “We need this at work…” @hackebrot
46. “You broke our deployment” @hackebrot
47. “…and this ‘poyo’ introduction is a great example how direction of cookiecutter can seem immature to my eyes from times to times” @hackebrot
48. “…can’t you simply…” @hackebrot
49. “Not sure how much ‘sponsorship’ is needed, but here is a site for allowing the crowd to contribute as I know my organization would be interested in helping…” @hackebrot
50. Unseen work: running sprints, ordering stickers, exploring sponsorship, submitting talks @hackebrot
51. Suggested solutions oftentimes require even more work from maintainers @hackebrot
52. People do not respect boundaries and send direct emails rather than opening GitHub issues @hackebrot
53. Maintaining open-source projects becomes work at some point, but without compensation or clear boundaries @hackebrot
54. Empathy @hackebrot
55. Take-aways for maintainers
56. Set expectations @hackebrot
57. Work towards making yourself redundant @hackebrot
58. Say “NO”! @hackebrot
59. Lead by example! @hackebrot
60. Do not tolerate toxic and abusive behavior from community members! @hackebrot
61. Allow yourself to take breaks or even walk away @hackebrot
62. Take care of yourself! @hackebrot
63. Thank you!
64. https://speakerdeck.com/hackebrot/ the-challenges-of-maintaining-a- popular-open-source-project @hackebrot
65. @hackebrot