Why Your Open-Source Project Feels Broken (and How to Fix It)

Transcript

2. Why Your Open-Source Project Feels Broken (and How to Fix It) Aransiola Ayodele Developer Advocate @leomofthings
3. The Pain Point
4. Open Source Festival 2022 A few surprising stats: star ≠ adoption, fork ≠ contribution You Built it… Why aren’t they staying?
5. What ‘Broken’ Looks Like
6. Open Source Festival 2022 Feels Broken ≠ code is broken • Common signs: ◦ Confusing setup ◦ Sparse or outdated docs ◦ Unclear API behavior ◦ Cryptic errors ◦ Radio silence on issues/PRs
7. The shift: OSS as a Product
8. Open Source Festival 2022 Think like a product, Not just a project • Who are your users? • What’s the onboarding journey? • What does success look like?
9. Quick Comparison OSS Maintainer vs Product Manager mindset
10. 5 Friction points that drive devs away
11. Poor or missing error handling
12. Inconsistent naming, poor DX
13. Poor Documentation Developers really want API documentation to be searchable, understandable, and easily integrated into any format they desire.
14. No examples, and outdated instructions
15. Maintainers are not responsive
16. Fixing Developer Frictions
17. Open Source Festival 2022 • Structured and relevant error handling mechanisms • Living Documentation • Updated API examples • Active community/give the people a voice • Community feedback
18. What Good Looks like - Netlify - Stripe - And many more
19. What I learned while contributing to Section Engineering
20. Let’s have a quick recap
21. Thank you! Aransiola Ayodele Developer Advocate @leomofthings