text stringlengths 0 2.08k |
|---|
• Adapting conference learnings (e.g. JSConf EU) to code projects (e.g. Hoodie) |
• Implementing community guidelines, codes of conduct, and contributor covenants |
• Overcoming community inertia and changing existing power dynamics |
• Strategies for successfully implementing new community models in established projects |
• Open governance process as a means to encourage contributions |
• Distributed ownership and decision-making |
• Cloning oneself through delegation of responsibilities |
• Transparency and making processes reusable across multiple tasks |
• Risk management and quantifying potential mistakes |
• Earning trust and relinquishing control in project leadership |
• Institutionalizing governance through frameworks (e.g. Apache Software Foundation) |
• LTS and new release lines for a project |
• Importance of having a large contributor base to handle various tasks and responsibilities |
• Need for open-source projects to optimize for contributors' goals and interests rather than setting rigid project goals |
• Metrics for measuring success in an open-source community, such as user happiness and feeling safe to contribute |
• Critique of the BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life) model and its limitations in modern open-source communities |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm Nadia Eghbal... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And I'm Mikeal Rogers. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** On today's show Mikeal and I talked with Jan Lehnardt. Jan is a developer and business person from Berlin, co-creator of Hoodie, vice-president of Apache CouchDB and co-founder and CEO of Neighbourhoodie Software. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** With Jan we focused on building healthy communities. We talked about how he approaches community organizing, his evangelism of CouchDB, creating Hoodie and what it means to build sustainable open source. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** We also talked about drive-by contributions, contributor funnels and the differences between popular and healthy open source projects. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Hey Jan, how's it going? |
**Jan Lehnardt:** I'm fine, thanks. How are you? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Pretty good, pretty good. I've known you for a long time and really learned a lot from you. Why don't we get into... Maybe we can start out before I met you and maybe talk about some of the... Where did you start in open source and what did you learn there? |
**Jan Lehnardt:** I think my very first interaction with something that I would call an open source community was a small - at that point larger - German community that had a website that would explain how to do websites, which was kind of revolutionary at the time, because you barely have a medium that explains how th... |
I quickly learned all the HTML and CSS that was around in '99, and then PHP came around and I wanted to check that out, and also found a community there. That's kind of how I got started. |
I've spent nearly ten years in the PHP community, from just learning and understanding how it all work, to eventually becoming a core contributor. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** How did you two meet? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** We met through Ted Leung He is sort of like a guy behind a guy for a lot of Apache stuff, and so I worked on this thing called Chandler Project at Open Source Applications foundation. That was fun, but T. J. was there, I believe he was a mentor to the Apache project, so he introduced me and Jan in th... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Nice. I met Jan through a cold email. I think I stumbled upon Hoodie somewhere, and I was like "Oh my gosh, this is the most perfect project ever!" because there was like a whole section that was talking about all these different experiments they were doing for funding, and he was so friendly and spla... |
**Jan Lehnardt:** That's very nice to hear, thank you very much. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Well, thank you, because that conversation... I just sort of like enthusiastically emailed you, like "Oh, can we like... I can understand better how Hoodie gets funded, and all this stuff." But I ended up understanding so much more about open source culture and community-based on that conversation... ... |
I remember Jan saying, when he was talking about CouchDB, that he didn't actually start CouchDB, but a lot of people associate him with it because he was the one who was talking about it all the time. So it was cool just to hear from someone who's had the experience... Like, it doesn't always matter who writes the orig... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I remember when I was getting into CouchDB that the tone and - for lack of a better word - the personality of the project was very Jan, and attached to Jan. |
\[04:05\] I think I remember a blog post that Damian did about how popular it's been with basically no marketing, unless you count Jan, he said. \[laughs\] |
So I'm kind of curious, how did you get involved into CouchDB and how did you end up taking on that role, as an evangelist for it and a community organizer? |
**Jan Lehnardt:** It was a time nearly ten years ago when I was adrift... I was doing stuff, but I didn't know what I was really doing. I was starting university and had an RSS reader a million entries long; I just read everything I could find on the internet when that was still possible, and eventually found Damian's ... |
Then I eventually learned about CouchDB and the thing I was doing professionally at the time was PHP, MySQL work, specifically scaling MySQL. It was a fun topic ten years ago; it's kind of solved these days, but it was quite cutting edge then. And then when I read about the principles behind CouchDB I thought, "Well, I... |
I was kind of a little bit early... We now have this whole NoSQL movement and CouchDB kind of kickstarted all that. I had a kind of fear of missing out really early on, so I got involved. This topic specifically is really obscure. Damian, the inventor or CouchDB at the time had his development environment on Windows, a... |
I emailed, I said "Here's my plan for porting this, and supporting it", and he's like "Yeah, give it a try", and I gave it a try. That worked out, and I kind of stuck around since then. I wrote the How To Build CouchDB For Your Linux Distribution readme. That wasn't really a guide or documentation or wiki entry. And th... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] That's funny. So in those really early days when you were first starting, the community is growing and you're trying to bring something to the community... What are the things from the PHP community that you wanted to be different or the same? What did you wanna imbue in the community as y... |
**Jan Lehnardt:** I've learned a lot of terrific things from the PHP community. Technically, some of the smartest people on this planet have taught me stuff that still helps me in my day-to-day job. Some of the folks running Facebook's infrastructure these days have 10-15 years ago spent a lot of free time teaching a 1... |
Just as an example for one of the things of how then it was really, really terrible... You know how Perl scripts have the file ending .pl, and on IRC you can ban people based on the domain they're connecting from, so we just banned all Polish people just because they looked like Perl scripts, from our German IRC channe... |
\[08:13\] Back then PHP was the new kid, kind of what you're seeing in NodeJS these days... And you have to pick a bunch of fights to prove yourself, so Perl was one of the fights that we picked early on. But this complete lack of empathy for anyone was throughout everything, including IRC etiquette. The person who did... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Did you have a moment where you just became a nicer person? Or was it over time that you matured? |
**Jan Lehnardt:** That was a couple years later, maybe around 2010, when Twitter was starting to become really good at drive-by snark, like really hurtful cynicism, criticizing all the people... At some point I felt that when I was doing that I wasn't helping anyone, I wasn't adding anything useful. Other people will b... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I have a really hard time picturing you being a not nice person. |
**Jan Lehnardt:** I can show you chat logs from 15 years ago, I was a terrible person. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** We need evidence! \[laughter\] And what specifically were you doing around CouchDB to grow the users and contributors and spread the word? |
**Jan Lehnardt:** A bunch of things came to mind right when you asked the question. I was very active on the users mailing list. Typically, open source projects back in the day had mailing lists where people could ask questions. I knew this from other communities as well, they were kind of hostile... There were very st... |
One of the revelation moments were when I was on vacation or was gone for a while, like a week or so, and other people started replying in my voice - in the same tone, in the same kind of emphatic voice... And I was like, "Oh, I kind of created a culture here. That's kind of nice." So that's one of the things. |
I was fortunate enough to be relatively flexible with my life, and one of the challenges I set for myself - because again, I knew this from the PHP community... Germany had the first PHP conference, which I was at back in 2001 or 2002, really early on. I've since grown to love the PHP conference life, where a lot of pe... |
\[12:09\] So I wanted to become a speaker. I asked a bunch of local user groups to give talks, and one of the talks I proposed was about CouchDB, the new thing that I'd found that year. And they said, "Oh, that was really good. I blogged about it", they blogged about it, then another user group in a different country a... |
Afterwards I said to them, "This was my first English talk, was it any good? Can I apply at conferences?" They said, "Yeah, sure." This was better than a bunch of the talks that you'd see at other conferences. And I don't wanna brag, I'm pretty sure my talk wasn't that good, but it was okay, they gave me enough confide... |
In 2008 OSCon flew me over to Portland, I think, and that's where I met Mikeal, coincidentally. I gave my first US CouchDB talk there. And yeah, I just wouldn't shut up about CouchDB. I had conferences where my other nerd friends would hang out, and eventually... When you introduced me, it's like my claim to fame for C... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And now you're one of the faces and voices of Hoodie, right? You've started this new project that's also going really well, we heard a little bit about it earlier. Similar to the previous question, what did you take from the CouchDB community and what did you wanna do differently when you started up ... |
**Jan Lehnardt:** Yeah, green field is a really good word. I was really excited to not have... I learned a lot through being part of the CouchDB community, helping setting it up, and I learned a lot about other open source projects as well. The more popular one gets, the more you learn about others as well. Especially ... |
The way I would explain it - maybe I have to explain how Hoodie got started. We had a project in Couch called Couch Apps, which was this idea of running full HTML web apps inside a database. It was a neat idea, but kind of a dead end. We thought we'd revolutionize web development with it. One of the problems with it wa... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.