Maintaining a big open source project: lessons learned
summary
Maintains Devise, starts with 150 issues and 51 pull requests and reduces the backlog by triaging: ask for reproduction, add “needs more info,” close after two weeks, use pry and git bisect to reproduce and find regressions, require tests before merging. Reverts risky behavior when a rolled back a one-line change broke apps and caused billing through validation callbacks. Uses GitHub saved replies, stale bot, issue templates and asks for CVE help when needed.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (31)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:18CLOUD Pain Free Rails 66 Deployments
- 1:28SPARE TIME
- 1:43I DIDN'T KNOW WHERE TO START
- 3:26YOU'RE GOOD ENOUGH
- 3:49The process of examining problems in order to decide which ones are the most serious and must be dealt with first
- 4:54IT'S HARD TO FIX BUGS WITHOUT ENOUGH INFORMATION
- 5:09TRY TO REPRODUCE THE ISSUE IN ISOLATION
- 7:11IT'S IMPORTANT TO ASK QUESTIONS
- 8:37IT'S HARD TO ASK QUESTIONS
- 9:22ISSUE TRIAGE IS A GREAT WAY TO START
- 10:54REVIEW PULL REQUESTS
- 11:08TEST THE SOLUTION
- 11:32REPRODUCE AN ISSUE
- 12:19OPEN SOURCE IS MORE THAN CODE
- 12:54REGRESSION
- 13:15UNKNOWN ISSUES
- 13:27DIVE INTO THE CODE
- 14:26YOU FOUND THE CODE THAT'S CAUSING THE ISSUE
- 16:13WE HAVE A LIMITED VISION OF THE WORLD
- 17:21ASK FOR ADVICE
- 18:21IT'S OK TO MAKE MISTAKES
- 19:29DOCUMENT THE DECISIONS
- 20:00GIT COMMIT MESSAGES
- 21:02CODE IS EXPENSIVE
- 22:04BE NICE
- 22:46RESPECT OTHER OPINIONS
- 25:09TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF
- 25:23RELY ON AUTOMATED TOOLS
- 26:09ASK FOR HELP
- 29:05YOU DON'T NEED TO CODE TO HELP
related talks
39mMaintaining a big open source project: lessons learned
35mTending Your Open Source Garden
23mScaling Open Source Communities
37mOpen Source Maintenance
23mKeep cool and maintain an open source project
27mWhy I'm Closing Your GitHub Issue
26mFrom 9-to-5 to Pull Requests: Sustainable Open Source Contribution
27mManaging A Healthy GitHub Community