Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
If you work on open source software, especially command-line tools, I want you to know about newly available research reports and design guidance, and a user research HOWTO, that you can pick up and reuse.The …
How should we think about trust when it comes to adding new maintainers to a project? Another way of saying that is: if I'm an existing project maintainer, considering whether to entrust you with co-maintainership, …
Colleagues ask me for advice on diversifying their hiring pipelines, recruiting and retaining volunteer contributors, and addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in marketing to and taking care of their users. Here are a few …
Someone in a group chat mentioned a particular annoyance in dealing with doctors, nurses, and similar medical experts. Sometimes you take pains to ask them a specific, deliberately-worded question, and they don't really seem to …
Someone asked me for pointers on doing product management (and, to a lesser extent, project management) in Free/Libre Open Source Projects for the first time, after many years of experience in proprietary software. I basically …
My mother died recently, after a long decline in her health, and I was one of the main people who helped take care of her. (Here’s her obituary.) While caring for her, preparing for her …
Let's say you're a maintainer who's just received a new contribution. A new contributor has submitted a patch/pull request. And the fundamental idea of it is one you like, but the diff itself will require …
Recently I've helped a few folks as they sought professional help from lawyers, or mental health professionals such as psychiatrists or therapists. Here are a few tips; they're more relevant in the United States but …
I met David Lord at this year's PyCon, talking about maintainer burnout and how to make projects more resilient. Since then, we've been chatting regularly to help us develop material for our respective writing projects. …
Someone in a group I'm in just asked others' opinions on working in higher education. I said:In big institutions -- such as higher education and government and companies that have over, say, 300 employees -- …