What have I been writing when I haven’t been writing here?
Stuff I wrote
Duck Alignment Academy
- Incentives power open source — A company making requests of a project has to explain the incentives in a way the project members will care, not in a way the company cares.
- Conway’s Law applies to your documentation, too — In order to keep your documentation from falling into the Conway trap, you have to actively curate it across the entire project.
- Should you care about GitHub stars? — If GitHub stars give you dopamine, then care about them. Don’t try to draw any conclusions from stars, just bask in their glory.
- Bug fixes only matter if they get to the user — Any bug that blocks a release from getting to users is worthy of an immediate fix release. This is true even if the bug is minor by itself.
- Plan for what happens after your project is done — Your open source project will end one day. That’s okay. But you should think about what will happen with your project after it’s done.
- Roadmaps are valuable for open source projects — The moment you go from one contributor to two, you have to start coordinating. The project roadmap is an excellent tool for that.
- No task is too small to track if that’s what it takes to get it done — When in doubt, add the task. It’s better to track unnecessarily than to not track something important.
- License changes are API changes — Making a license change affects how people interact with your project. You need to treat license changes as if they were changes to your API.
- Getting started is just the start — You’ll need to continually refine processes as you go. That’s easier if you think beyond just what you need at the start.
