Resources
A free 38-page sampler ebook on assessing an existing project, starting to think about budgets and money, and teaching and including unskilled volunteers. Includes the introduction and table of contents for the full (forthcoming) book.
Harihareswara has run or helped run several distributed sprints/hack days/hack weeks. Here are some tips that help. The approach is less "top-down schedule" and more "here's how to adapt to and support the emergent ways people will act".
Helping less-skilled programmers improve their code, dealing with the poor-quality pull requests themselves, and redirecting their energies to improve your project in other ways: tips and examples.
New contributors to open source project should learn how to learn from and contribute to our shared "lab notebooks", troubleshoot with the scientific method, and develop hypotheses.
Tips and resources for creator-maintainers, moving from general management to tech management to open source management.
How to get the best results from hackathons, sprint weeks, and all-hands meetings.
Follow these tips to get new contributors, and turn them into new maintainers.
Whether you're an Outreachy/Google Summer of Code intern or a mentor to an intern, these suggestions help you get the most career benefit out of the experience.
Check for these barriers that often slow down new users and contributors during outreach efforts.
Harihareswara lists some sources of money to fund free culture and open source software projects.
Consider these factors to predict whether you can improve an open source/free culture community.
Harihareswara recommends approaches and types of hosting for those digging into FLOSS applications.
Good interaction design helps us execute on our values; here's the why, the how, and the next steps.
How to attract corporate sponsors for funding for open source projects.
Developers' events: goals, people, activities, things you'll need, and logistics to prepare.
How do Dreamwidth, Zulip, MediaWiki, FogBugz, and Debian make it easier for less experienced users to submit bug reports?
How easy is the developer setup process for your project? Here's a sample audit report.
Read lessons learned when Harihareswara implemented the Friendly Space Policy for Wikimedia Foundation technical events.
Read lessons learned when Harihareswara successfully mentored an Outreachy intern (who continues to contribute to the project).
Harihareswara presented this poster, summarizing lessons learned at the Recurse Center, at PyCon 2014.
This open source team successfully trained all its developers to also review each other's code.
Why the new PyPI took so long to arrive, and what's new.
Harihareswara traces the FOSS internship program's growth over its nine-year history.
When we compare community anti-harassment policies to licenses like the GPL, we learn unexpected lessons about our attitudes towards governance.
Even if you've been using Python for years, you may not know about alternative command-line interpreters like bpython, some helpful debugging options, and how to use the codecs module.
Shallow cloning, blaming, nicer diffs, and more features help you use Git more efficiently.
Harihareswara describes using a screenscraper to grab text and adding a client-side search engine to three years' worth of newspaper columns.
Who's funding open source projects, a quick case study, key steps in figuring out a good project idea, budgeting, hiring, and submitting, and how a new workgroup can help you get going.
For PyGotham 2017, Harihareswara and Jason Owen co-wrote and co-starred in a play about code review, company culture, and collaboration styles.
At PyCon 2016, Harihareswara demonstrated some useful (and useless) underappreciated features of HTTP.
Harihareswara delivered this keynote address to the Open Source Bridge conference in 2012, discussing lessons she learned from her parents that helped and hindered her as an open source leader.
This keynote address to Wiki Conference USA 2014 (transcript, audio, and video available) discussed features of good learning environments.
A newbie-friendly walkthrough of how developers fix bugs, including searching for the right file, making the git commit, getting it reviewed and merged, and closing an issue in a ticketing system.
Read and watch more presentations on and interviews about technical and management topics (grants, Python, MediaWiki, outreach events, project management, etc.)