Upgrade to Pro — share decks privately, control downloads, hide ads and more …

The challenges of maintaining a popular open-source project

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
Tweet

More Decks by Raphael Pierzina

Other Decks in Programming

Transcript

  1. The challenges of maintaining
    a popular open-source project
    EuroPython 2018 — July 27, 2018

    Raphael Pierzina

    View Slide

  2. Thanks to the organizers and volunteers
    for a great event! !

    View Slide

  3. $ whoami

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  5. https://raphael.codes/

    View Slide

  6. @hackebrot

    View Slide

  7. View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  9. Maintaining a popular
    open-source project

    View Slide

  10. @hackebrot

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  12. https://github.com/audreyr/
    cookiecutter
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  14. Templates
    • https://github.com/audreyr/cookiecutter-pypackage

    • https://github.com/pydanny/cookiecutter-django

    • https://github.com/pytest-dev/cookiecutter-pytest-plugin

    • …
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  15. Contributing
    • Development of Cookiecutter is community-driven

    • Connect with other Cookiecutter contributors and users on Gitter

    • Everyone is invited to contribute!
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  16. View Slide

  17. View Slide

  18. View Slide

  19. View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  22. Cookiecutter
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  23. pytest-cookies
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  24. jinja2-time
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  25. poyo
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  28. Emails

    View Slide

  29. Challenges of a
    growing community

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  40. Expectations
    • Managing expectations is really hard!
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  41. Learnings: Expectations
    • Write documentation for different audiences
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  42. #WriteTheDocs

    View Slide

  43. Frustrations for
    maintainers

    View Slide

  44. Bike-shedding
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  45. “We need this at work…”
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  46. “You broke our deployment”
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  47. “…and this ‘poyo’ introduction is a
    great example how direction of
    cookiecutter can seem immature to my
    eyes from times to times”
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  48. “…can’t you simply…”
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  50. Unseen work: running sprints,
    ordering stickers, exploring
    sponsorship, submitting talks
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  51. Suggested solutions oftentimes
    require even more work from
    maintainers
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  52. People do not respect boundaries
    and send direct emails rather than
    opening GitHub issues
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  53. Maintaining open-source projects
    becomes work at some point, but
    without compensation or clear
    boundaries
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  54. Empathy
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  55. Take-aways for
    maintainers

    View Slide

  56. Set expectations
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  57. Work towards making yourself
    redundant
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  58. Say “NO”!
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  59. Lead by example!
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  60. Do not tolerate toxic and abusive
    behavior from community members!
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  61. Allow yourself to take breaks or
    even walk away
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  62. Take care of yourself!
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  63. Thank you!

    View Slide

  64. https://speakerdeck.com/hackebrot/
    the-challenges-of-maintaining-a-
    popular-open-source-project
    @hackebrot

    View Slide

  65. @hackebrot

    View Slide