Managing online development communities

A few friendly reminders to people shepherding development efforts:

Strike a cordial tone and do not tell people they do not understand the code.
Doing this repeatedly to frequent contributors is even more silly.
Do not ignore contributions.
It’s ok if you are busy, but indicate that by replying to the patch, do not ignore it completely.
If someone takes the time to go over your bug tracker and fix multiple issues, do not ignore the patches.
See above.
If someone tells you that there are issues in your use of transactions, do consider it an option.
Transactional safety is hard, it’s likely that details might have been overlooked.
Find a decent working process for reviewing contributions.
Requiring contributors to bug you until you magnanimously take a look at the contributions gets very tiresome quickly and lessens the odds that said contributor will keep contributing.
Give constructive feedback.
Stating ‘This sucks, but I don’t have time to explain right now.’ helps no-one but your own ego. A better approach, in case you really do not have the time, would be to write, ‘I have some concerns over the implementation that I would like to voice. I am, however, travelling for the remainder of the week and will try to reply early next week’.

That is all.

No comments yet.

RSS Feed

Stuart's Soliloquy to the void