Build the right thing
- User experience (UX) is key
-- "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman is a great book.
-- "Open Source Design" is a great group with an active forum
+ - "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman is a great book.
+ - "Open Source Design" is a great group with an active forum
- Also wanted to plug an IT Academy class on UX, Dorian Freeman and Mike Lawrence
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- Make your users awesome, feel their pain
- You should be making people better at their jobs, that they are better researchers or archivers
- Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra
- Somewhat controversial quote:
- "The higher the number of bugs in the database, the better the software looks"
- Look at the bug tracker first when evaluating a project. The question is how they manage and organize incoming bug reports
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- Commit history is also relevant. Another quote: less about meeting deadlines, more about active community.
GitHub survey: What is important to people?
Documentation
- 93% of people reported being frustrated with incomplete documentation. "Free Software is Suffering because Coders don't know how to write documentation"
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- We have 6 different guides for Dataverse. You should find someone who does know how to write documentation.
Q: Did the survey indicate what type of documentation people were missing?
- Travis CI shows which branches are passing or failing
- We also have a code coverage button on our readme, and it's red because our coverage isn't high enough, but I think that encourages us to improve.
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- Encouraging Contribution
- Tweet: When you're excited to contribute to an open source project, but then you start looking at the code