ROrollcat·Jan 24, 2024
I maintain two projects that I use daily for both work and personal stuff, that have attracted a modest, but appreciable amount of contributions. In both cases, the codebases are relatively small (500-1k sloc), and laser-focused on doing exactly one thing well.
I'm very grateful for every contribution, no matter how small - people have found bugs, fixed real problems, done cleanups. The hardest part is telling someone that a feature/idea does not have a place in this project. I think the general emphasis on minimalism tends to help here - I've never had to deal with any drama.
In terms of workload, again - the minimalist design and extremely clear goals have helped so much. I got trapped by that once before - I volunteered to build an internal automation tool (that saved someone else from doing like 1h/d of work), but literally couldn't s
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pare 1h/mo to maintain it; the cause of the maintenance burden was an influx of changes in the APIs of the external services it integrated. So now I'm much more careful about volunteering to maintain integrations with external tools; in case of these two projects, the targets are SSH and ZFS - both have extremely stable interfaces.
In both cases it was absolutely worth it to publish and (very lightly) promote the projects; since these are "devops" tools that theoretically have unlimited potential for causing great harm, having any response at all helped reassure me that the code I'm running against production infrastructure has fewer unknown bugs. https://i.pinimg.com/474x/2f/e0/87/2fe08785e8eb112cada6da789...
The projects: <https://github.com/rollcat/judo>; <https://github.com/rollcat/zfs-autosnap>.