The Art of Collective Creation
Transforming Your Open Source Repo into a Collaborative Hub
Starting a cool new open source project is not only fun but leaves you with a good feeling of providing for others, in an almost humanitarian act. Setting up these first lines of code, that hopefully already provide some kind of benefit to other enthusiasts, is downright awesome. Keep doing this, it is what makes open source great.
In a stroke of fortune and careful planning, your project might start gaining momentum, attracting users who find value in what you've created. While the difficulties of creating a popular repository are another project on itself, there are invaluable insights to be learned from leveraging collaborative efforts, particularly in the realm of continuous project improvement.
This post delves into the art of transforming your open source repository into a thriving collaborative hub, exploring strategies that resonate with successful collaboration. These main points are vital to attracting contributors:
Be inviting and responsive: This is the easiest, tell people you want their input and answer their questions in a timely manner.
Make onboarding easy: This is done through a combination of a good instruction document (i.e. README), readable code and an easy dev setup process.
Ensure quality: The quality should not decline (dramatically), this should also be done with the least effort possible.
Be inviting and responsive
Central to successful collaboration is the cornerstone of openness and responsiveness. Creating an environment where potential collaborators feel welcomed and valued is pivotal in driving collective progress. In your project's README, consider adding a dedicated paragraph that extends a warm invitation to others, encouraging them to actively engage and contribute. Even something along the lines of “Feel free to open a PR for any improvements” will do.
It sounds too simple to be true, but it's pretty straightforward – most programmers are up for collaborating — they might be a bit shy to kick things off themselves. So, when you take the lead and invite them to join in, your chances of roping in new collaborators shoot up.
Make onboarding easy
Simplifying the onboarding experience is a key ingredient for fostering a user-friendly collaborative atmosphere. When new folks can quickly get the hang of your project, they're more likely to jump in, contribute meaningfully, and become active parts of your open source crew.
Providing a good README
Crafting an informative and engaging README is a pivotal aspect of establishing a welcoming environment for collaborators. Your README serves as the first point of contact, offering a snapshot of your project's purpose, functionalities, and usage.
By investing time in creating a clear and well-organized README, you not only facilitate quick comprehension for potential contributors but also demonstrate your commitment to maintaining a user-friendly and accessible project.
Make sure you have contribution guidelines. Lay out guidelines for potential contributors. Explain how they can contribute, the preferred coding style, submission process for pull requests, and any other relevant information.
Write readable code
Reading code is hard, you already know that. But when you set up a project all on your own, you will be the expert on all the quirks and edges in the code. For you, it always looks perfectly readable. In reality, you become blind to the complexities of the project and make it more complex with every commit.
Writing readable code is probably the hardest part in this post. Making your code more readable can be ensured by applying different techniques from software engineering. For example: KISS, DRY, YAGNI, style guide, types (for non-enforcing languages), etc.
All of these techniques can also be overdone, so apply them wisely. Sadly, this is one of those areas of software engineering where experience makes a big difference, so the more you train this the better you will get (and the more you will curse your older projects).
Development Setup
When it comes to potential contributors, grasping and comprehending the code they intend to modify can already be quite hard. Therefore, it's important to streamline the development setup and make it as straightforward as possible.
A valuable approach to speed up the onboarding of new contributors is to supply a setup script by you. This practice can significantly simplify the process and guarantee uniformity in everyone's development environment. Consequently, this not only smoothens the entry for new contributors but also enhances overall code quality.
A setup script should ideally bring everything that is needed to start developing after its execution. For a project, this could be a shell script that installs all necessary prerequisites, sets up a virtual environment and validates everything is ready to run.
Ensure Quality
Despite the numerous advantages that contributors offer to the project, upholding the code's quality can become more challenging. To ensure the sustained success of your open source project and ongoing contributions, it's crucial not to compromise on quality. The previous steps already contribute a lot to ensuring a high quality project. Still, there are additional steps you can take to ensure the quality.
Central to ensuring the quality of the project is a good CI pipeline (i.e. GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, Azure Pipelines, …), specifically a quality gate. Visualize this gate as a pivotal checkpoint within the CI pipeline, responsible for conducting thorough evaluations before merging PRs. The gate is equipped to enforce coding conventions, perform static code analysis, and execute an array of automated tests.
Ideally, this all happens automatically each time a PR is opened.
Think of the quality gate as a diligent custodian, ensuring coding consistency across the board and preemptively preventing errors or vulnerabilities arising from deviations in coding standards. Notably, it conducts an exhaustive analysis of the codebase through static scrutiny, swiftly flagging questionable coding practices and breaches of established best practices. Additionally, it undertakes automated testing, ensuring the robustness of both new and existing code.
The quality gate's strength lies in its proactive nature, preventing bad code from being merged to main. This helps avoid the buildup of less-than-ideal code with hidden quality issues. At the same time, it promotes a culture of always getting better, encouraging contributors to follow high-quality standards.
To set up a strong quality gate, you need to carefully organize and bring together different tools and ways of checking. Think of it like assembling a toolkit that includes tools like linters, type checkers, etc. for ensuring code quality and weaving together various testing methods in the development process. Regularly looking at and adjusting the gate's rules keeps it effective as the project's needs and quality expectations change.
In summary, while contributors are a vital part of open source projects, ensuring quality is a joint effort. By using a reliable CI pipeline along with a dedicated quality gate, the project protects itself from issues with code quality. This method doesn't only handle technical stuff; it also creates an environment where high-quality contributions are the standard, leading to a more resilient and long-lasting open source journey.