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I've worked on a lot of open source Haskell projects over the past ten years, and continue to do so today. It's been a great source of fun and learning. It has been, and will continue to be, a major part of my life, my work, and my hobbies. However, I'm making a conscious decision to shift where my focus lies.
My goal is to focus much more on enabling others to work on projects, rather than doing so myself. I've come to this decision for a number of reasons:
- I think it's healthiest for the projects in question to distribute the knowledge of how to maintain them, debug them, document them, etc, across a larger group of people. (In other words: bus factor.)
- I don't want to set myself up as a bottleneck on any project. Doing so hurts the project (per previous point), and ultimately will force me to make decisions on which projects will and will not be supported.
- I'm hoping that I can offer help and mentorship to people trying to get more involved in open source development, maintenance, or other activities. I know how valuable these activities have been to me personally and professionally. I hope I can help others do the same.
If you see one of my open source projects that you'd like to become a comaintainer on, or contribute in some way, reach out. I can't make promises about my time, but I can promise that I will strive to make time available to mentor people looking to get more involved.
In collaboration with some others, I'm planning on writing some kind of "guide to open source maintenance" document to help keep the projects I'm maintaining running smoothly. I'm hoping that such a write-up will be helpful for others. More generally: I encourage others who maintain open source projects to take similar steps towards helping others join their projects.
Related documents I've written before include:
Communication
If you're interested in this, you're probably wondering how best to communicate that to me. What I recommend is:
- Pings on the Github issue tracker, or sending a PR, are pretty great, and others can see them too
- Sending me a private email can work also
- Chat me up in person! I'm going to be at LambdaConf next week, and at two Israeli conferences (Scanapeno and FLIP) in July. If you see me at a conference, meetup, or elsewhere, I'm always happy to discuss open source projects.
- I've been looking into the best option for text based chat. (This is why I did that write-up on matrix.org a few weeks back.) After a lot of review and experimentation, it looks for now like gitter.im is the best bet for now. I'm already hanging out on commercialhaskell/commercialhaskell if you want to hit me up there.
(I considered writing a blog post about the comparison of different chat options I did, but ultimately decided it would be more noise than it's worth. If people are really curious how I ended up on gitter.im, let me know, and I'll reconsider publishing that post.)