After I posted my presentation slides, transcript, and video from my presentation Don't drown in your open source project!, I received two follow-up questions (1, 2) on Twitter that I thought deserved a little better response than what I could do in 140 characters. So, here goes:
Do you ever abandon old projects? Thoughts on right/wrong ways?
Yes, in fact I've abandoned probably a dozen or so projects. The simplest examples:
I maintain many open source projects on GitHub and elsewhere (over 160 as of this writing). I have merged and/or closed thousands of Pull Requests (PRs) and patches in the past few years, and would like to summarize here many of the reasons I don't merge many PRs.
A few of my projects have co-maintainers, but most are just me. The bus factor is low, but I offset that by granting very open licenses and encouraging forks. I also devote a set amount of time (averaging 5-10 hours/week) to my OSS project maintenance, and have a personal budget of around $1,000/year to devote to infrastructure to support my projects (that's more than most for-profit companies who use my projects devote to OSS, sadly).
According to the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America, there are 1.6 million Americans with IBD (Inflammatory Bowel Disease). While that means less than 1% of Americans have either Crohn's or Colitis, that's a pretty big number—and chances are you know someone with IBD, maybe even a close relative!
But due to the fact that Crohn's is usually an invisible illness, many people don't know some of the myriad joys of a typical Crohn's patient's life. This blog post aims to clear that up.
Most people I know have one or more of the following phobias:
I've been supporting Drupal VM (a local Drupal CMS development environment) for Windows, Mac, and Linux for the past couple years, and have been using Vagrant and virtual machines for almost all my development (mostly PHP, but also some Python and Node.js at the moment) for the past four years. One theme that comes up quite frequently when dealing with VMs, open source software stacks (especially Drupal/LAMP), and development, is how much extra effort there is to make things work well on Windows.
The big problem, I see, is that almost all the tool-builders for OSS web software run either macOS or a flavor of Linux, and many don't even have access to a Windows PC (outside of maybe an odd VM for testing sites in Internet Explorer or Edge, if they're a designer/front-end developer). My evidence is anecdotal, but go to any OSS conference/meetup and you'll likely see the same.
Ansible for DevOps, my first book, is finally available for sale on Amazon and iTunes (in addition to LeanPub, where it's been available as an in-progress work since last February!).
I've written quite a bit about the my writing process, book sales pre-publication, and motivation in previous blog posts, linked here:
Edit: Many people have been asking for more technical detail, benchmarks, etc. There is much more information available on the Raspberry Pi Dramble Wiki (e.g. Power Consumption, microSD card benchmarks, etc.), if you're interested.
After the Raspberry Pi 2 model B was released, I decided the Pi was finally a fast enough computing platform (with its 4-core 900 MHz ARMv7 architecture) with enough memory (1 GB per Pi) to actually use for web infrastructure. If not in a production environment (I would definitely avoid putting the Pi into a role as a high-load 24x7x365 server), then for development and/or testing purposes. And for some fun!
It gets a little bit under my skin when I see a link to PHP: A fractal of bad design posted in the comments on every article mentioning PHP on tech sites, blogs, and forums.
PHP developers get it: PHP is full of ugly warts, and is not perfect. Far from it.
Developers brazen enough to admit they don't detest every minute of programming in PHP are blithely dismissed by 'real' developers. Ironically, many of these 'real' developers enjoy using some other dynamically-typed language to which 80% of the arguments against PHP equally apply.