Friendly Open Source Projects

An analysis of Bizo open source projects for sources of contributor friction. I gave this presentation to the Bizo engineering team during our weekly Lunch & Learn.

Transcript

1. Friendly Open Source Projects Veronica Ray
2. Friction • A tool to check your project for common sources of contributor friction • Takes inspiration from Flint • Written in Ruby • Not perfect • Guidelines are coarse grained • Assumes people already know about your project
3. Friction checks for • README • Contributing guide • License • Bootstrap script • Test script • .gitignore
4. What else is important?
5. Marketing • Conference and meetup talks • Blog posts • Project website • Tweets
6. Criteria • 15 projects • On GitHub • Written by Bizonians • Used at Bizo • Updated in the last 3 months
7. Projects • Raphy Charts • aws-java-sdk-stubs • Atmos • Pixii • CSV Serde • Args4j-helpers • Crucible Survivor
8. Projects • Jtty • Fakehttp • Joist • Dtonator • Tessell • S3CP • Skiis • aws-tools
9. Analysis • All have READMEs • None have contributing guides • Five don’t have .gitignore files • None have a bootstrap script • None have a test script
10. Licenses • Four don’t have license files • Of those four, two don’t indicate license in the README
11. Development setup • All have instructions • One has instructions on the project website but not in the README
12. Target platform • 10 don’t make the target platform (ex. Scala 2.10) clear in README • Five do
13. Examples • Nine include examples • Six don’t
14. Testing • None describe how to run tests or mention the testing frameworks used by the project
15. Project website • 12 don’t have a project website • Three do
16. Main strengths • Many cool open source projects • Nice tag lines • Up to date • READMEs are informative
17. Main issues • Right now our projects are not used much outside of Bizo • Testing is not described • Few projects contain examples • Few projects specify target platform
18. Booyahs • Raphy Charts, Joist and Tessell have great websites • Atmos has Scaladocs • Stephen has lots of blog posts about his projects • S3CP has development setup instructions and is a published Ruby gem • Atmos, S3CP, Pixii and Skiis have CHANGELOGs
19. What I can do • READMEs • Examples • Build and test scripts • Blog posts • Project websites • Get the word out!