Bringing Pinax Back to Life- FOSDEM

Transcript

1. Bringing Pinax Back to Life By Katherine “Kati” Michel
2. About Me
3. In Summary Without a long term strategy, Pinax became difficult to maintain. I’ll tell you the problems and possible solutions, so we can learn from it.
5. Time Machine: 2003
6. Time Machine: 2005
7. Time Machine: 2007
8. Time Machine: 2008
9. Re-Inventing the Wheel “Re-inventing the wheel makes a lot of sense if your goal is to understand wheels better.” -James Tauber
10. Fast Forward: 2017 Photo by Adam Gregory of https://atomimages509.wixsite.com/atom
11. How It Began “Pinax is every idea I’ve ever had.”
12. How It Began Personal Sites Inspiring Reusable Features
13. How It Was Going 80 Projects and Apps account blog static stripe waitinglist zero company documents team-wiki wiki forums socialauth Pinax Themes Popular Pinax Apps Pinax Starter Projects django-user-accounts pinax-stripe pinax-announcements pinax-badges pinax-blog pinax-calendars pinax-cohorts pinax-comments pinax-documents pinax-eventlog pinax-events pinax-forums pinax-images pinax-invitations pinax-likes pinax-messages pinax-news pinax-notifications pinax-points pinax-ratings pinax-referrals pinax-submissions pinax-teams pinax-testimonials pinax-types pinax-waitinglist pinax-webanalytics pinax-wiki pinax-templates pinax-theme-bootstrap
14. How It Was Going GitHub Organization, Global Docs, and Slack
15. How It Was Going Sustainability lacking
16. Challenge and Opportunity
17. Critical Problems • Tribal knowledge • Existing docs difficult to find, duplicated, inconsistent • Variation in configurations • Lack of engagement with individuals • Lack of engagement with the community • Tasks being done manually
18. Solutions • Document tribal knowledge • Make one source of docs, easy to find, and use • Choose one configuration approach, across projects • Reduce the backlog of issues and PRs • Write more blog posts and publicize well • Automate more tasks
19. Beginner Mindset
20. Simplified, Self-Service, Self-Sustaining
21. Wheels in Motion
22. Problem: Tribal knowledge Solution: Document the tribal knowledge
23. Documentation • Highly valued • Often overlooked • And a means for establishing inclusive and accessible communities -From GitHub’s 2017 Open Source Survey
24. Pinax Documentation
25. Problem: Existing docs difficult to find, duplicated, and inconsistent Solution: One source of docs, easy to find, use
26. One Source of Docs
27. Problem: Variations in configurations Solution: Choose one configuration approach and implement across projects
28. One Configuration Approach
29. Problem: Lack of engagement with individuals Solution: Reduce backlog of issues and PRs and catch up with engagement
30. Engagement with Individuals • Over 160 issues closed • Over 100 PRs merged • Over 30 PRs closed • Countless questions answered in issues and Slack
31. Problem: Lack of engagement with the community Solution: Write more blog posts and publicize well
32. Engagement with Community
33. Problem: Tasks being done manually Solution: Automate tasks
34. How It’s Going • Automation is still lacking • Global documentation is in need of improvement
35. Biggest Lesson Learned: Release Succeeded Due to My Communication and Teaching Skills • Blog posts attracted contributors • Release documentation enabled them to help, to mutual benefit
36. Additional Ideas • Automation: GitHub Actions/Apps, Probot • Workflow: protect branches, status checks, require review • Reduce scope: archive repos, mark repos as deprecated, disable issues • Bring on additional maintainers: selective permissions • Productivity: GitHub built in functionality (canned responses, notifications management, etc.)
37. Thank You! Twitter: KatiMichel GitHub: KatherineMichel Email: kthrnmichel@gmail.com
38. Q & A