Tending Your Open Source Garden
summary
Argues that small open‑source projects rarely attract contributors so maintainers must tend them: prepare readable README and tests, use Travis CI to gate contributions, name things so they’re searchable, and document a clear contribution flow; avoid merging features one won’t maintain and split unwanted features into separate gems (example: pull request 95 split deployment from core). Reports closing 200+ stale issues on grit, moving off gollum, and recommends semantic versioning and changelogs.
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chapters (49)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:17Questions
- 1:39Our first vegetable garden
- 2:08Why I like software development
- 2:55Why I like open source
- 3:50Lessons from gardening
- 4:15My experience
- 6:25Rails is more like farming
- 6:38Land management
- 6:58Steve Labnik
- 7:30Show of Hands
- 7:58Planning
- 8:59Time
- 9:35cultivation
- 10:11name
- 11:21Q
- 12:23Documentation
- 12:50Readme
- 13:47Install
- 15:04Examples
- 15:24Choose a License
- 15:57Follow Conventions
- 16:46Sow
- 17:04The easiest part
- 17:14Talk about it
- 17:30Blog about it
- 17:54Social media
- 18:15The fun easy part
- 18:55Watering
- 19:34Setting Contribution Guidelines
- 20:19Getting People Engaged
- 21:01Giving Feedback
- 23:05Give It Time
- 23:29Defend
- 24:02Maintain
- 24:54Tests
- 25:12Travis CI
- 25:36Dont feed the trolls
- 26:59Remove
- 27:27Multiple Environments
- 28:22Semantic Versioning
- 29:52Change Log
- 30:21The Point
- 30:59Ask Some Questions
- 32:23Project Status
- 32:34Lesson Learned
- 32:56Grid
- 33:30Learning from Mistakes
- 33:52Practice
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