Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

Tag
Advice

11 Oct 2024, 12:00 p.m.

Double Standards And Volunteer Behavior

A fictional example:You're in a volunteer group that does a public service chore, like sprucing up a local park or maintaining a health information website. It's been around for many years. Most people treat each …

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26 Sep 2024, 9:20 a.m.

Changelogs and Release Notes

My friend Ned Batchelder posted, "A list of commits is not a changelog!" and spurred this post.Summary: We'd all benefit from restoring the distinction between a detailed changelog and brief release notes, but that's hard …

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22 Jul 2024, 8:00 a.m.

Make Room for Big News

We live in interesting times.A friend of mine was taking an online class yesterday, and big national news (President Biden deciding not to pursue re-election) interrupted that class. The news distracted everyone and shattered concentration.Sometimes …

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19 May 2024, 14:40 p.m.

Links and References For My PyCon US Keynote

Today I’m giving the closing keynote address at PyCon US 2024, sharing “Untold stories from six years working on Python packaging.”I aim to post a fuller transcript with slides within the next several weeks. But, …

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24 Apr 2024, 11:42 a.m.

Model UX Research & Design Docs for Command-Line Open Source

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 …

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08 Feb 2024, 13:00 p.m.

Whether And How To Trust A New Maintainer

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, …

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03 Jan 2024, 11:20 a.m.

Some Diversity Advice I Give

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 …

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19 Dec 2023, 11:05 a.m.

Nailing Down An Answer, Or At Least A Question

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 …

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14 Nov 2023, 10:45 a.m.

Going From Proprietary To FLOSS Product Management

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 …

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08 Nov 2023, 1:15 a.m.

Eldercare, Family Caretaking, and End-of-life Logistics: Stuff I Learned

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 …

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