Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

Tag
Open Source and Free Culture

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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07 Nov 2023, 23:45 p.m.

Set Contributor Expectations To Reduce Ghosting

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 …

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21 Aug 2023, 11:35 a.m.

User Support, Equanimity, And Potential Cross-Project Tools and Practices in Open Source

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. …

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06 Jul 2023, 12:07 p.m.

Recently Emitted Elsewhere

A few things I recently wrote in other places, in response to questions and claims by others, and would like to preserve and share here.In-person eventsIn response to a claim about why "online-only conferences won’t …

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09 May 2023, 13:00 p.m.

Maintainer Burnout: PyCon US 2023 Followup

At PyCon US 2023, David Lord facilitated an open space discussion of "maintainer burnout, how to survive it, and maybe how to prevent it." Here are some notes (incorporating his; thanks, David!), my analysis, and …

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13 Apr 2023, 9:30 a.m.

Your First PyCon, But Not Your First Convention

Someone I know just decided to come to this year's PyCon US in person and asked me:It's my first PyCon. Are there any tricks or landmines I should know about? I assume that the standard …

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22 Dec 2022, 15:10 p.m.

Speech-to-text with Whisper: How I Use It & Why

Whisper, from OpenAI, is a new open source tool that "approaches human level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition"; "Moreover, it enables transcription in multiple languages, as well as translation from those languages into …

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20 Nov 2022, 16:05 p.m.

An Intro-To-Rust Course

Lars Wirzenius generously offered to teach Rust basics in a few free trainings for programmers who already contribute to free and open source projects via code. I got a lot out of an intro-to-Python workshop …

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10 Nov 2022, 11:20 a.m.

Mastodon, the Fediverse, and A Warning About Mastodon.social

As of this week I'm not posting much to Twitter anymore. I used to post the same stuff on Twitter and on another microblogging platform called Mastodon, and now I'm really just posting on my …

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20 Sep 2022, 12:30 p.m.

What You Miss By Only Checking GitHub

Too many researchers, entrepreneurs, marketers, open source sustainability activists, and commentators assume that activity on GitHub and data from the GitHub API is a reasonable proxy for activity in and data about open source as …

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