Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

Tag
Open Source and Free Culture

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 …

Read More
25 Jul 2024, 22:10 p.m.

"A Story About Jessica" by SwiftOnSecurity

The cybersecurity expert SwiftOnSecurity, a decade ago, wrote a parable called "A Story About Jessica" and posted it to their (now-deleted) Tumblr blog. I found it moving and insightful. The consultancy Superbloom pointed to it …

Read More
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, …

Read More
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 …

Read More
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 …

Read More
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 …

Read More
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. …

Read More
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 …

Read More
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 …

Read More
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 …

Read More