Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

Tag
Open Source and Free Culture

13 May 2022, 16:00 p.m.

Contribution Metrics Are Messy: An Example

I frequently notice folks asking or answering questions like "how many contributors does this open source project have?" or "how much contribution is this project getting?" Here's an example of why those aren't simple questions.ffmpeg …

Read More
05 May 2022, 13:00 p.m.

PDFtk, qpdf, And Dealing With Password-Protected PDFs

I slice, dice, and transform documents often enough that I rely frequently on pandoc and pdftk. I often use pandoc to turn Markdown, HTML, wiki syntax, reStructuredText, etc. into each other or into LibreOffice, MS …

Read More
02 May 2022, 16:00 p.m.

"I want to start contributing to open source": My (Current) Advice

Want to become a better programmer? Join the Recurse Center! In the virtual PyCon hallway track, a newcomer to the industry said he'd like to get into contributing to open source, and asked for my …

Read More
21 Apr 2022, 12:15 p.m.

Nurturing Volunteers: A Shortcut And An Event Template

A few suggestions to help you nurture volunteers in your projects. (Expanded from some advice I recently gave Ms. Boba, founder of BobaBoard -- she's a coaching client of mine.)Live Tour As First Draft: Extract …

Read More
30 Nov 2021, 10:14 a.m.

Sign Up Now For Free Maintainer Skills Workshops

Maintainers of open source projects often need help learning how to address issues such as "how do we recruit and promote project members?", "what do we spend our money on?", and "how do I finally …

Read More
24 Nov 2021, 9:48 a.m.

Health Insurance & Retirement Plans For Open Source Maintainers

This is huge. The Open Collective Foundation has just announced: "OCF now offers employment options to initiative workers—with health insurance!" As that page says: "Initiatives fiscally hosted by OCF can have employees, with access to …

Read More
03 Jul 2021, 16:45 p.m.

Researching The Leadership Gap for Legacy Projects

I've given a lot of conference talks recently. As part of the PyCon US Maintainers' Summit in May, I delivered an eight-minute talk, "Researching the leadership gap for legacy projects". The video is now available, …

Read More
01 Jul 2021, 12:58 p.m.

Software Bill of Materials & the US Federal Government

In February, the United States's President Biden signed an executive order on the US's supply chains; he followed this up with an EO in May specifically concentrating on improving cybersecurity. To quote Tidelift's summary, "in …

Read More
18 Jun 2021, 22:05 p.m.

Monday Will Be Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day

A few months ago, in my talk "What Would Open Source Look Like If It Were Healthy?", I told a story of an overwhelmed open source software maintainer. Every solstice is a Responsibility Amnesty Day, …

Read More
07 Jun 2021, 17:28 p.m.

Sidestepping the PR Bottleneck: Four Non-Dev Ways To Support Your Upstreams

This is the textual version of my June 7 2021 online talk at Upstream Live: "Sidestepping the PR Bottleneck: Four Non-Dev Ways To Support Your Upstreams", 23 minutes. Video is now up. Intro Hi, I’m …

Read More