Tag: open source

Too many open source projects suffer from inadequate documentation, and that hurts their adoption, their communities, and puts more burden on maintainers. Many people who create open source software don't see see themselves as writers, but today I'm sharing tips for documenting open source projects without it needing to take up a huge amount of time to get something published and ready for (docs) contributions.

API reference documentation changed the way we built integrations, and eventually became part of the driving force for OpenAPI adoption and all the good tooling that flowed from it. As a developer experience specialist, I spend a lot of time thinking about how human users can work with the technical …

Today's post is about bystanders and open source. We sometimes have anxiety about doing things on "other people's" projects but the thing about open source is that those are not "their" projects, those are "our" projects, and they only exist because people other than their nominated gatekeepers chip in now and then.

I'm the proud owner of a Streamdeck XL but as an Ubuntu user, the tool support isn't great. There's a Python library that gives a bit of a GUI but I found it hard to use and I'd have needed to put each piece of functionality as a commandline script that this program could call. Instead, I am using go-streamdeck to create a custom application - and I'm having fun! Today's example adds a single button that runs a command to take a screenshot.

This post is about the open source project, Joind.in. Joind.in is a tool to allow attendees at conferences or other events to offer immediate public feedback to speakers and organisers at those events. Joind.in is an open source project run by volunteers. For the last 6 years I've been a maintainer of this project, following a year or two of being a contributor. Over the last few months, myself and my comaintainer Rob Allen have been mostly inactive due to other commitments, and we have agreed it's time to step aside and let others take up the baton.

I did a very unscientific twtpoll recently regarding what brought each of us into open source. Plenty of people took the time to vote or retweet, so I thought I'd loop back around and let you know how it looked overall when the poll closed.

I'm a huge fan of Phing and use it regularly for build and deployment tasks. Often, I'll ask about a plugin that I wish existed, and get a very courteous "patches welcome" from the nice people in the #phing channel on freenode. This has happened a few times, so I thought I should probably look at how to make a new phing plugin, this article shows you how to make the simplest thing I could think of: a simple "hello world" plugin.

I'm delighted to announce that the nice people over at CakePHP have very kindly invited me to speak at their event in Manchester in September - CakeFest! They brought this event to Manchester last year and I wasn't able to make it, so I'm super-excited to be there this year.

If you follow me on twitter you might have seen some overexcitement when I managed to edit and compile a vala application recently. I use a great deal of open source tools, but many of them don't seem open to me, because I don't have the skills to modify the code. Regardless of that, it's still vitally important that it is open (this is a whole other post and I'll avoid that tangent right now).

If you read this blog often, you'll know that I am:

• crazy about APIs

• living with some accessibility issues

Put these two things together and what do you get? Actually don't answer that! Today what you get is an example of integrating with JIRA's REST API, because their recent "upgrade" locked me out of the issue listings pages completely and I really do need to be able to see a list of bugs! Their bug editing screen is quite usable, so it's just the list that I need here, but you could easily call their other API methods as you need to.

On Monday 19th March I'll be speaking at PHP Leeds. The topic is all things git and github; as an open source project lead I see lots of very capable programmers taking their first steps with github. In this session we'll talk about how you can use these tools to …

As of a few days ago, and following Chris' post, I am now the proud owner of an open source project.