Hints for Successfully Managing an Open Source Project

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Today I want to change things a bit from my usual postings: instead of covering a technical evangelism subject, I want to share with you what it means to run an open source project.

For more than two years, my friend David Rousset and I have led Babylon.js. We started the project after hearing that IE11 would support WebGL (Microsoft Edge supports even more) and we wanted to make it easier for people to build 3D scenes and games. For the following two years I spent all of my spare time making Babylon.js a simple and powerful 3D engine for web developers.

The Beginning of a Fantastic Journey

During the first 2 months, it was like a dream: you develop and give life to all the ideas you have in mind. It is pure bliss.

This phase is what I call the preliminaries. Like in a love affair, that is the best period, just before taking it into more serious territory, where complications can happen.

Shipping is important. No seriously. I still see a lot of projects that stay in development for ages. I know this is hard but this is necessary for you to ship your project.

At some point in time, you are ready – or you think you are.

David and I ran into the first challenge quickly: coding the product is not enough; you also need to work on your communication. We wrote and agreed on the articles we wanted to publish about Babylon.js, the forums we wanted to post on, the events we wanted to attend in order to present it, etc.

The feedback from the web development community was huge. One of the reasons was that we worked with a gifted designer (Michel Rousseau). He helped us to not just ship a framework, but also to develop tons of 3D scenes that showcase what people can achieve with our tool.

This is the first important tip: Developing a framework is just half the job. Letting people know that the framework exists and why they should care about it is the other – much more important – half.

That’s the second important tip: having a great framework is not enough. You have to provide a lot of examples and concentrate on having some really shiny ones to impress developers enough to take a closer look.

The Puppy Syndrome

I first heard about this concept at dotjs conference in 2012 from @fat

While you are the happiest developer in the world, something strange is bound to happen. It will be subtle at the beginning but will soon become more tedious. User feedback will become overwhelming and demanding:

• Some users will start acting strangely, asking for more and more features and you need to be firm or bring up reasons why you aren’t supporting or don’t intend to support these features. Always remember that more features means more work and also more choice for implementers. What is a seen as a great idea for one user can be seen as overhead and annoying to others.
• People will ask you to fix their code and thereby monopolizing your time (and prohibiting you from being able to get necessary work done on the project)
• Others will demand you to completely change the framework to address their needs regardless of your vision and what you want to achieve with it.

This is the PUPPY SYNDROME! This is when your lovely puppy that you pet every day with love and dedication mutates into a monster you barely can control.

This is the most complicated part of your job. You have to stick with your vision but you also have to bend it a little bit to accommodate the needs of your users. Use your common sense here!

This phase can take quite a while and you need to be good in your communication to get allies in your user base. From these allies you can form a community that brings you to next level.

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by David Catuhe via SitePoint