The Veldt, by Ray Bradbury. The first chapter of The Illustrated Man. Recorded for my son.
Mentoring and recruiting in open source
Most of the talks that I attended at Open Source Summit last week in Denver were in the general category of recruting and mentoring of new contributors. This is a bit of a brain dump of that content.
The first talk I want to highlight was a panel session featuring Dawn Foster, Ruth Ikegah, Matt Denny, and Suah Khan, titled “First PR to lifelong impact” What particularly stood out to me here was the following:
Clearly identifying a specific skill, or goal, for which you are trying to recruit is so much more valuable than just saying “Come help us!” It can be very intimidating to be asked to simply look around and find something to do, but when you’re asked to do a specific thing, there’s none of that initial confusion as to where you’re going to be useful. If you want to help a project recruit, have informal conversations with various people about where they could use help, or what isn’t getting done.
Don’t underestimate the value of recognition. Saying thank you, publicly as well as privately, is what keeps people around. List contributors in your release notes, even if they only did something small.
Present your information in multiple formats. Just because you prefer to learn by reading doesn’t mean that’s the “right” way. Short format videos are more appealing to (some) younger people. Provide a prominent “Prefer video?” link on your text content, and vice versa. Some people just want the facts. Some people want to talk to you, while some prefer to never have to talk to anyone. The more formats you can provide content in, the better, but there’s definitely a tradeoff with maintenance costs.
The next two things that I went to are a lot to summarize.
I went to Emily Shaffer’s talk “Nowcomer … but not new”, which was one of the most valuable presentations I’ve been to in ages. She does a lot of what I do – mentoring experienced programmers who are new to open source. Her notes/slides are HERE. I will post the video here once it’s available. Her practical tips about teaching people how to do the weird uncomfortable things that open source requires were just fantastic, and I can’t really do them justice. The main thing for me, though, was trying to get folks to understand that their internal goals and deadlines are completely uninteresting to open source projects, and trying to use those as motivation won’t work – you have to find ways to appeal to *all* users, not just yours.
I also attended a mentoring unconference. The notes from that are HERE. The section on mentoring non-code contributors was particularly valuable, with lots of practical tips about how to motiviate people to contribute to open source even if they don’t much care about software. In particular, more clearly communicating what problems your software solves, and for whom, was a recurring theme. And helping, say, a lawyer understand the kind of impact that their work would have, helping *millions* of people rather than the handful their daily work reaches, can be powerful motivator.
Reluctant AI User
I have been resisting AI for a long time, for a variety of reasons. Based on some conversations at Open Source Summit last week, I am reluctantly starting my AI journey. I’m documenting this in video format, at least for now. Maybe I’ll get AI to transcribe them later!
FAIR WordPress repository
Yesterday in the keynote at Open Source Summit in Denver, FAIR (Federated and Independent Repositories) for WordPress was announced. I’m hoping I can get involved in some way. I have been an avid WordPress user for 20+ years but left my participation in the community over disagreements about project governance. It would be cool to be able to contribute to the project in some meaningful way again.
Workbench
Last weekend I used my workbench to make a workbench. Now I need to make a lot more cool stuff to justify the time and expense of making space to make things.
Pen trays
While learning how to use my new router, I made some fountain pen trays. I used scrap wood, and it took about 10 minutes each. Then I looked on Etsy, and found that stuff like this sells for between $25 and $75. Maybe I should quit my job and go into making pen trays full time.
Hôtel Mozart, Brussels
I travel quite a bit for work, and have recently decided that the hotel loyalty thing – always staying at the same chain, and collecting loyalty points – wasn’t doing anything for me. I wasn’t using the room nights, and don’t seem to get any perks.
But everywhere I go, I see cool weird hotels that I think wish I had stayed at.
So I’ve started actively seeking out these weird hotels, rather than the usual Marriott or Hilton. I’ve ben eyeing Hôtel Mozart, in Brussels, for years, and this time decided to stay there.
It was quite an experience. It appears it was build by a drunk architect, with winding stairs going in all directions, not-square corners in all the rooms, strange acloves everywhere, positively stuffed with art. All of the walls are elaborate moroccan tiles. There was a fountain outside my room, just because.
The doors are all gorgeously carved.
The guy who owns it used to live in California, and moved to Brussels years ago to run this hotel. There are photos in the lobby showing his extensive world travels.
My room was tiny, but that’s fine. I mostly view a hotel as a place to sleep, rather than as a destination. But the door to my bathroom was also elaborately carved, and had stained glass windows!
It’s maybe a minute walk from Grand Place, maybe 3 minutes from Centraal (the train station), and surrounded by all manner of great restaurants – Greek, Korean, Indian, Peruvian, and so on, not to mention a zillion chocolate shops, bars, souveneir stores, and so on.
The staff was attentive and friendly, the beds clean and comfortable, and the (Free!) breakfast every morning delightful.
I will definitely be staying here again.
More photos on Flickr, including full-sized versions of all of these ones.
Workbench construction
I spent yesterday and today building two little side-workbenches for my drill press and my band saw, in order to free up the main workbench for … y’know … actual work space. I have a new project to start tomorrow – or possibly next week – and it will be less frustrating trying to find a square inch to work in. At least until I clutter it up with something else.
Clockwork Angels
I’ve started reading Clockwork Angels, by Kevin J. Anderson, based on the story by Neil Peart that became the album Clockwork Angels. The album already makes a *little* more sense, and I’m only in the second chapter. I wonder if they expected people to just get it, or if they really expected the True Fans to read the book. I guess I’ll know more in a few days.
My Effin’ Life
I finished My Effin’ Life. It’s deeply personal. I can’t imagine sharing that much with the whole world.
The thing that struck me the most is the meaning behind certain songs that were always a little insecure. In particular, Slipping now had a whole other layer beyond the obvious. Beautiful and also heartbreaking.
Meant to tell you
Tell you from the start
Meant to show you
What’s inside this shallow heart
But I could not find the words
Worthy enough to say
I slipped along the way
I hope we hear more music from Geddy, but even if we don’t, he and his pals have created a wealth of beauty and shared it with the world.