Openly broken

April 22, 2014

Wherever I see something, I feel that there is something broke in it. I can’t always pin point the issue but I can’t shake that feeling.

I have the similar feeling regarding open source projects. I am inspired by the concept of open source and worked on few projects and learned a lot, but when it comes to working on new projects I always have one issue. “Understanding the process”, its not always the case that open source projects are properly documented. developers busy fixing the bug or working on awesome features, they tend to forget to document or implement process.

Let me give you an example. I decided to work on some open source project. I should have project source and its build dependencies on my development system. There are always steps that you need to follow. One for each project and the steps may vary with operating system, sometimes with architecture of machine, . Even if I am able to set up environment successfully, it takes a while to understand complete code flow. It gets worse with different standards and technologies followed and used by each project. Most of the above steps are not documented or automated unless the project gains some popularity and someone decides it is time to change process. Sometimes, the project is big enough that community around it decides to maintain status-quo.

How many of you faced this issue?

For a developers world wide, who are new to open source, these are major barriers. For effective utilization of developer resources world wide, we should be following standard way of doing things.

There are some major changes coming in this area. Thanks to git and github, there is one common place where I can get gist of most of the open source projects ( at least the mirrors ) and this introduced some way of standardizing the ways of doing things. npm has standard way of doing things. These solutions are not complete. There are places which needs improvement.

Here are my suggestions for various problems we face everyday. For addressing the issue of set-up, maintainers can provide snapshot of VM which can be directly downloaded and used or they can create a container ( like docker ) which can be used directly by developers without worrying about setting up. If someone wants to report a bug, they can just create a snapshop of this VM and submit in bug tracker. Tools for visualizing code or architecture of whole projects needs improvement. IDEs supporting the same needs to be evolved.

If you have any questions, follow and ping me on Twitter- I’m [@praveenpenumaka][twitter].

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