Helping Hands Maintainers don’t Grasp

A repo for resources of the talk.

Evan Kohilas

nohumanerrors.com

Conference	Slides	Video	Notes	Length	Year
PyCon US	🔗	🔗	🔗	10 min	2024

Abstract

Often as a developer of an open source project, we focus too much on developing the project ourselves, and often overlook what the value of an open source project in the community can offer.

There are often things that we could miss, that can only be seen from the perspective of a contributor or user.

The talk will elaborate and give examples of some of those things, such as:

• Automations to avoid the barriers of review nits and local requirements
• Documented project structure for a new users’ better understanding
• Discoverability that prevents users from creating another unmaintained repo.

Key Takeaways

Maintainers can do less work when a user come along with a question of issue, if that user finds the repo to be:

• Cleanly structured and documented, allowing them to better understand where they can make a fix, or extend functionality
• Thoroughly tested, so they can find examples of how it’s used and add tests themselves.
• Easy to find and contribute to, meaning that the user can make their own contributions, rather than forking or making another unmaintained repo.