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The challenges of maintaining a popular open-so...

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

Raphael Pierzina

July 27, 2018
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  1. • 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
  2. Agenda 1. Maintaining a popular open-source project 2. Challenges of

    a growing community 3. Frustrations for maintainers 4. Take-aways for maintainers @hackebrot
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. Contributing • Development of Cookiecutter is community-driven • Connect with

    other Cookiecutter contributors and users on Gitter • Everyone is invited to contribute! @hackebrot
  6. 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
  7. 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
  8. 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
  9. 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
  10. 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
  11. 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
  12. 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
  13. 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
  14. 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
  15. 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
  16. 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
  17. 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
  18. 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
  19. 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
  20. “…and this ‘poyo’ introduction is a great example how direction

    of cookiecutter can seem immature to my eyes from times to times” @hackebrot
  21. “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