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**Charlotte Spencer:** Oh, yeah... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And generally, one of the problems that we get into is that there's too few maintainers, and increasing the funnel actually puts a lot of new load on them to get at these PRs. What are the conversations like with project like that that have fewer maintainers that you're trying to get to be more welco... |
**Charlotte Spencer:** I'd say firstly it's actually okay for those maintainers to be grumpy about something. It's how they deal with it after the fact... I don't mind if you wake up and you're like, "Oh, I don't wanna review these pull requests", because sometimes it takes me a notoriously long time to review somethin... |
\[20:06\] But at the same time you are an open source project, and you are calling for contributions, so I don't know... You can be grumpy, that's okay, but... If someone's doing their first ever pull request, you need to remember how terrified they probably are, and how in their head they're doing a good thing for you... |
I feel like if we spent more time remembering what it was like to be a first-time contributor, we'd all be a little bit nicer to people. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, it's fine if you wanna complain in the backchannel, just don't take it out on the person sending the pull request. |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah. I complain all the time. I have a private Twitter account where I just complain about everything, and I complain in private Slack channels and the communities I admin, and stuff. Everyone who knows I'm nice also knows that I am one of the biggest complainers in the world. A lot of people wo... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** What do you think people forget about what it's like being a new contributor? What is that person thinking about and what are they hoping to get out of the experience. |
**Charlotte Spencer:** I've been doing programming for two years, which isn't a long time, and I still wake up most days anxious about the program that I'm gonna do... Or I'm trying to do some pull requests for Hacktober, I'm like "Oh gosh, what if they don't like it? What if I got it wrong?" and I even do this when I'... |
Even if you have to write it down on a post-it note somewhere - new contributors feel anxious, scared, worried that they've done something wrong. If you can remember that going into when you review a pull request; even if you're reviewing a pull request for someone who's done 6,000 pull requests, just remember that thi... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Here's what I found interesting about... In fact, they've both recently learned how to code, and also dove into the world of open source because they think they are really separate things, too. I've met people who are very experienced with software development, but have never made an open source contr... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I loved that first date analogy because it captures how awkward it is. \[laughter\] |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Oh, yeah. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** You just don't feel comfortable in the position that you're in. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** And you could have gotten on other dates and been really comfortable with other people, but this date is awkward. |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah, I mean, I just submitted a pull request but it hasn't been reviewed in three days, so should I call them, or should I wait for them to call me? It's difficult. \[laughter\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Wow, we could really take this analogy pretty far, I think. |
**Charlotte Spencer:** \[24:08\] I could write a book about it. \[laughter\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** That's be great. I hope that you put together some kind of comic strip with that, it would be brilliant. |
**Charlotte Spencer:** That would be great. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That's the awkward part of it too, right? A maintainer shouldn't feel pressured to respond to anything immediately, but when there is an early response, it also really increases engagement apparently. So maybe even just like saying, "Hey, I see this. I'll get to it later" is useful, so people don't fe... |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah. I had this lovely person... I opened an issue like a year ago and I wanted to turn the Your First PR website into a -- set it up with Jekyll so that it could take blog posts, and this really lovely person spent a long time doing that for me, and it took me like three months to review it, to... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I like that. It's kind of just like having open channels of communication so that people understand that everyone is trying. I feel that way about even just like email and everything in general; meeting with people... We're all trying our best with the time that we have. |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah. I'm actually merging the pull request right now. Yaay!! |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Live merge! Nice! |
**Mikeal Rogers:** That's great! |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Kind of shifting gears a little bit, I feel like a lot of times that people talk about contributions, they talk about contributing code, and the conversation we've had even now - there are plenty other contributions you could make that aren't code related; what are some categories of contributions tha... |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Everything that isn't code... I do this talk called Open Open Source, which is about 20 minutes in which we basically have a conversation much like we're having here about how to improve the experience and what the experience is like. And 15 minutes in, I'm like "You'll have noticed that I haven'... |
\[28:10\] A concrete example is does somebody wanna write a blog post about Node Interactive? Does someone wanna write a blog post about the event that Hoodie just spoke at? Can somebody help us design a new logo, and things like that? There are millions of things that I can't think of right now that people can do that... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And some of them are just fun and community building. I remember in the io.js days, some sectors logged an issue that was like, "Hey, let's talk about fun logos", and it blew up to like 500 comments. |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah, I remember that. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, and it's just people posting, like -- some of them serious brand treatments and some of them hilarious, these quickly photoshopped things, and it was really fun. A lot of the way that people found out about io.js and got interested in it was this crazy logo thread. |
**Charlotte Spencer:** That's pretty much how I remember io.js being a thing, that logo thread. I did a very small version of that for Your First PR when I was like - a couple of days after I started the thing - "Can someone make me a logo?" There were ten people who I had never heard of it before, I never had a conver... |
I consider programming an art. I am an artist, I just happen to do art by the medium of code. So those are just awesome contributions that make me happy. Sometimes even more happy than "Oh, I've built a thing, an app!" or "I turned your website into a blog." If someone's like, "Oh, I spent ten minutes in Paint doing a ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[laughs\] This all sounds really great for big community projects. Hoodie has a very active contributor community, and Node obviously has a very large community... Do you think this is also true for a small project that has just a couple of maintainers, where they feel like they're doing the bulk of ... |
**Charlotte Spencer:** I think it very much depends... It's much harder for two people who don't have followers on Twitter, for example. Just two cool people, doing a cool thing - it's much harder to get your project out there, which is also another tertiary reason I guess for Your First PR, because I wanted to highlig... |
Even a little bit to Your First PR - although it's not really a code-based thing, there are a lot of people contributing their projects and issues and things like that. So if you're tiny it's much harder, and there's a lot of work that needs to be put in there. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think some of these things are even more important for small projects, like being nice and really welcoming... Because at the end of the day you do have less people coming because you're a smaller project. You need to work even harder to try and retain them and make their experience pleasant. |
**Charlotte Spencer:** \[31:54\] I imagine it must be quite stressful, because you have to get everything right. I would expect someone to have a code of conduct, have a readme me that I can actually understand, and things like that. That's a lot of work, and if you're just one person who wrote a 500-line module about ... |
I have quite high standards for any GitHub project because I believe that we can do good things and we can have good projects. Small projects is on my list of things to think about on how we can actually help them to get help. I have written a blog post about things that you can do to make your project more accessible,... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Can you talk about that a little bit? I think that when people think about strategies for getting new contributors sometimes it's like "Make sure your documentation is really good and you have all these nice things written out." That's also like, you have to go out to meetups and talk about your proje... |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah, it's exhausting. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Very different things, right? |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Yes. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** And having to balance out... It almost seems like some of the inbound stuff is like must-have. Once you can actually get somebody looking at your project, you've gotta make sure they stick around by giving them clear things to do, but no one will ever find it if you don't ever put yourself out there. |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah, and I think that... Oh, I'm too tired to go to meetups, and the only events I go to now - and it sounds a little bit arrogant, but the only events I really go to are either really niche ones where it's a couple of friends talking about something, or something that I'm speaking at. Because a... |
There's a lot of expectations on small projects to be like, "You have to be awesome at everything, and you need to tell me exactly what you need from me, and you need to sit there with me and help me, because you're really tiny and you want my help, so you have to do everything for me." It's like, "Actually, no. I just... |
I guess I'd recommend two things. One, have a code of conduct; I think that is the most important part of a project going forward. You need to set out your intentions immediately. And have a really good readme. A really good readme can go a long way. I guess it's like a pitch - I have opinions about that, but you're pi... |
If you can do a really good pitch in the readme, a pitch that's nicely worded and is friendly, liberal use of emoji and just a nice attitude, you're probably more likely to get someone going, "Oh, these people sound cool. I think I'll give them a hand." So I guess it's just about that nice thing again. |
And probably have some kind of social media presence on Twitter and tell me what your project is, so I can spam it out to people or retweet it on Your First PR Twitter account. |
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