Open Source: What Works, What Doesn't

My talk from the #AWSCommunity event about my experiences maintaining various open source projects.

1. Open Source What Works and What Doesn’t
2. Who am I? Michael Barrett Engineering People Lead, Operations Infrastructure Engineering @ Remind https://github.com/phobologic @phobologic on Twitter
3. What is this talk about?
4. The Projects
5. troposphere A python library that allows for easier creation of AWS CloudFormation templates. https://github.com/cloudtools/troposphere
6. nymms An independently scalable monitoring system that follows Nagios plugin standards. https://github.com/cloudtools/nymms
7. Empire A control layer on top of Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) that provides a Heroku like workflow. https://github.com/remind101/empire
8. stacker An AWS CloudFormation Stack orchestrator/manager. https://github.com/remind101/stacker
9. Starting Your Project
10. Motivation Why open source this? What will make this project feel “successful” to you?
11. Engagement Is this a problem area you feel engaged with? Is it something you’ll likely be engaged in for the foreseeable future?
12. What issue does it solve? What is the goal? How common is the issue? This will also help you focus, and make hard design decisions.
13. Focus How focused is the problem area? Tighter focus usually means it’s an easier project to maintain, whereas broad focus can require more work.
14. Choosing a License I Am Not A Lawyer! https://choosealicense.com/ is your friend What do you want to do with your project/who do you want to use it?
15. Starting Documentation README.md Developer/Contributing Documentation
16. Code of Conduct “When a project seems hostile or unwelcoming, even if it's just one person whose behavior is tolerated by others, you risk losing many more contributors, some of whom you may never even meet. It's not always easy to adopt or enforce a code of conduct, but fostering a welcoming environment will help your community grow.” -- https://opensource.guide/code-of-conduct/
17. Most Important: Picking a Name
18. More Documentation! Usage Documentation Tutorials/Demos
19. Promotion If eyes/users/contributors are important to you, it may take active promotion to make your project a success. Twitter/HackerNews/Reddit/Medium Join relevant slack teams Offline - go to meetups/conferences/give a talk!
20. Support How much effort/time are you willing to put into supporting your users? Start a Slack team or Gitter Community (and make it easy to find!) Be kind, be helpful Encourage feedback
21. Handling contributions Be polite, be gracious, be responsive Sometimes you have to say no Rule #1 of open-source: no is temporary, yes is forever. -- @solomonstre
22. It can take time Time to first PR: • Empire: ~1day • Troposphere: 3 months • Stacker: 9 months
23. The Team Having a team makes all of this a lot easier. Special thanks to @markpeek, @bobveznat, and @vesirin who I interact with on most of the open source projects I work on these days.
24. Getting paid for software you give away
26. Getting paid to work on stuff you give away Figure out your (potential?) employers outlook on Open Source Show that you engage in Open Source outside your work Talk about the benefits of Open Source Be up front about the costs of Open Source
27. Other ways to get involved Code Documentation Tutorials Design Answer questions
28. github/twitter: phobologic Great links: https://opensource.guide/ https://choosealicense.com/
29. Happy Hour!!