Bug Requests & Pull Reports

Getting people to contribute to open source can be hard. This talk looks at Powder, a simple Ruby gem, and some of the ways we tried to to turn bug reports into pull requests.

Transcript

2. @rodreegez mintdigital.com/adam
3. I <3 Open Source
4. Bug Requests & Pull Reports A tale of open source
5. Powder A Phil Nash & Adam Rogers gig (initially)
9. Chapters 1/. Dealing with people 2/. Bug requests & pull reports 3/. No issues, just pull requests 4/. Documentation, front and centre 5/. The moral of the story
10. Chapter 1 Dealing with people
11. What belongs in the project?
12. Is this a bug? Is it our bug?
13. We just wrote a little Ruby Script!
14. How do we deal with all this?
15. Communication FTW!
16. <3 GitHub Conversations around Pull Requests
18. Reduced frustration, made intentions clear
19. Chapter 2 Bug Requests & Pull Reports
20. Powder is dead simple
21. A bug report is just a pull request without the code
22. “Pull requests gladly accepted”
23. Good introduction to open source
24. Fork > Branch > Commit > Pull Request > Merge
25. How can we encourage this?
26. Ask the reporter how to fix
27. Give ‘em a nudge
28. Usually that’s all it takes
29. Chapter 3 No Issues, Just Pull Requests
30. A bug report is almost worse than no report
31. No Issues, Just Pull Requests
33. Bold move
34. So how did it go?
35. We have a man page! $ gem install gem-man && gem man powder
36. We also annoyed some folks
37. “well I just found a couple of issues but i am a newb at ruby so I can’t help so I’ll just keep my mouth shut” http://logicalfriday.com/2011/11/04/powder-no-issues-policy/#comment-198
38. But... some people were genuinely stranded
39. Pro’s and Con’s
40. Chapter 4 Documentation, front and centre
41. Readme Driven Development http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/08/23/readme-driven-development.html
43. Thor https://github.com/wycats/thor
44. Thor encourages inline documentation
47. Documentation == less bugs!
48. Chapter 5 The moral of the story
49. We still have a lot to learn with Powder
50. Contribute to open source!
51. Thanks!