PyPI, working with bad patches, theater, & availability
Hi, newsletter subscribers! Thanks for being interested in Changeset Consulting and my open source project management work.
Working on
2017 was, by far, Changeset's busiest year. The firm helped grow the Zulip community, spearheaded a language-agnostic, general-purpose linter tool for OpenNews, and worked on two different government health IT applications, just to name the biggest projects. I wrote up a year-in-review post at https://www.harihareswara.net/sumana/2018/01/02/0 in case you want more details.
Just in the last few months, I started working on two exciting projects with organizations close to my heart. I'm thrilled that the Electronic Frontier Foundation hired Changeset to improve HTTPS Everywhere's project workflow for developers & maintainers, working with Kate Chapman via Cascadia Technical Mentorship. And, thanks to funding by Mozilla's open source grants program and via the Python Software Foundation, the Python Package Index -- basic Python community infrastructure -- is getting a long-awaited overhaul. I'm the lead project manager on that effort, and Laura Hampton is assisting me.
PyPI and HTTPS Everywhere are at the top of Changeset's refreshed clients page: https://changeset.nyc/clients.html .
Resources
If you use Python, I encourage you to subscribe to the new PyPI-announce mailing list. It'll be low-traffic and we'll only post there with major PyPI news. https://mail.python.org/mm3/mailman3/lists/pypi-announce.python.org/
And check out some new work at https://changeset.nyc/resources.html, such as:
- How to Teach And Include Volunteers who Write Poor Patches
- Inclusive-Or: Hospitality in Bug Tracking -- How do Dreamwidth, Zulip, MediaWiki, FogBugz, and Debian make it easier for less experienced users to submit bug reports?
- Advice on Starting and Running a New Open Source Project
- Code Review, Forwards and Back: a play I co-wrote and co-starred in, about code review, company culture, and collaboration styles
Availability
Changeset is available for new engagements starting in mid-March. Do you depend on an open source project that's clogged with old bug reports, pull requests, or obsolete docs? Are you waiting for a new feature or bugfix that's been in git master for months? Changeset can work with that project, triage bugs, rewrite docs, work with them to set up release expectations, and help them get moving. Reply and we can set up a free initial consultation.
And I am available for talks https://www.harihareswara.net/talks.html this year, and would particularly like to talk with your community about real-world release management.
Best wishes, as always. And let me know if I'm going to see you at PyCon in Cleveland!