gistfile1.mkd

"Other developers are just like us - weird"

"If you ever need to deploy Django, you're good. If you know Capistrano and Unicorn they've got rip-offs of all that stuff."

"I think we should all admit we're horrible coders and move on" "We're all drug addicts - we're fighting methods..."

"It's easy to learn to play the guitar and be able to play Bob Dylan and Weezer and never get better."

"This is basically a talk that was given 30 years ago. We just have to keep giving it every few years because young guys come along and forget it."

"There's a difference between distributing software and releasing it."

"[the lieutenant model] might be overkill if you have three contributors, for example."

"Even though this is a Ruby conference and we all do open source with our closed iPhones and Macs..."

• No LICENSE file
• Installation - a lot of times the installation process holds software back
  • MySQL and Postgres are an example - MySQL is easy to install, Postgres isn't
  • The quick start is what's really important - the Rails 15 minute blog as an example
  • jQuery noConflict as an example... "it's really innocent.... it's like "come try me""
  • sudo gem install <foo> doesn't work if you're a CLI tool
• Lack of examples
  • ASIHttpRequest has excellent docs
  • All common tasks are covered
• Having a Public API is a good thing
  • A list of methods that don't change - not something that has a special keyword, but a social thing
  • If you're using RDoc - strip out all the internal stuff and only document the public APIs, then RDocs become useful
• Manuals
  • ronn - markdown file to manpages
  • In Linux - it's considered a bug if there's not a manpage
• Dependencies
  • I don't even know if I want to wade into this... cause it sucks
• Expectations
  • If a project says it does one thing, and you can't make it - your expectations are let down
• Projects that aren't maintained
  • Say if you don't maintained
  • Leave it there - but say "no longer maintained, looking for a good home."
• Features
  • It's too easy to add new features
  • Encourage plugins
  • It's much harder to remove a feature
  • If you don't except it now, you can always send it later
• Maybe your project has no users
  • "You don't even use it... say so"
• Lack of competition
  • He thinks "don't invent the wheel" is "bull crap"
• Too few releases
  • Release things when you fix things
  • worst thing is to get a bug report and have a developer say "oh yeah, I already fixed that"
• Changelog
  • Add one - it's useful to show people what has changed
  • Are there new methods, is there code I can delete and use the new features
  • hoe automates that
• Version numbers
  • Points people to semver.org
  • It creates trust by giving people an idea of what they can expect during an upgrade
• Beta vs production
  • "semver says if your code is in production, that means its 1.0"
  • "We have a lot of numbers... we're not gonna run out of 'em."
• READMEs
  • Where do you go for help?
  • IRC, mailing lists, etc.
• Contributing guide
  • How do you submit a patch
• Development guide
  • How do you run tests
  • It's much worse in Python, cause they don't have Rake
• Be a lazy maintainer
  • Do the minimal amount of work
  • Points to schacon/showoff
• Linkrot
  • Documentation gets updated, blog posts don't
• Hates it when a project has a domain name
  • Once the domain expires, you just broke all of the links everywhere
• Google your project name
  • Make sure you have a name that isn't autocorrect, etc.
• Poor marketing
  • Distill the essence, then show that
  • "I mean, it sounds social media to say that..."
• Project's he used as inspiration
  • Rails
  • jQuery
  • Redis
    • Quick start using redis-cli
  • Homebrew
  • Django has really great documentation
  • Unicorn
  • ASIHttpRequest
• "Life is too short to release crappy software"