CfP Info: https://us.pycon.org/2021/summits/maintainers/
Bringing Pinax Back to Life
Created by Katherine Michel at April 2, 2021
Email address: [email protected]
Title of a proposed talk: Bringing Pinax Back to Life
Duration of a proposed talk (in min)? 10 min
Topic summary
Project health and sustainability: What strategies have you used to make the lives of both maintainer and contributor easier in order to sustain a project?
Key takeaways (why/how it benefits the Maintainers Summit audience)
This talk will provide a variety of strategies to make the lives of both maintainer and contributor easier. By removing the friction from the process, maintainers will be able to get more done and contributors will be more easily onboarded. The talk will draw from best practices and will include some of the latest tools and GitHub features available.
Outline of the main talking points
Critical problems:
- Tribal knowledge
- Existing documentation difficult to find, duplicated, and inconsistent
- Variation in configurations
- Tasks being done manually that could be automated
- Lack of engagement with individuals
- Lack of engagement with the community
Solutions:
- Document the tribal knowledge
- Make one source of documentation, make it extremely easy to find, and use
- Choose one configuration approach and implement across projects
- Automate more tasks
- Reduce the backlog of existing issues and PRs and catchup on engaging with current issues and PRs; give proper credit
- Write more blog posts about plans and progress, and publicize well
Abstract
Pinax is an open-source ecosystem of reusable Django starter projects, apps, and themes for building websites. When developers began building Pinax in 2007, they had fun adding to it, but eventually Pinax had grown to become around 80 projects and apps. Without a strategy in place to make Pinax as easy as possible to maintain, the maintainers began to suffer burnout. I was hired to work on Pinax in the fall of 2017. In my talk, I'll outline the critical problems I've discovered and the solutions I'm implementing to make Pinax healthier and easier to maintain today and in the future. Pinax is a work in progress and I'm interested in sharing what I've learned and finding out what has worked for other people too.
Full name of speaker (s): Katherine "Kati" Michel
What is your preferred pronoun? She/Her
Speaker intro (provide a few sentences for a brief bio)
Katherine "Kati" Michel is currently working for The Wharton School on a game simulation project called Simpl and is a Pinax Maintainer. She is also a Django Events Foundation (DEFNA) Board Member and DjangoCon US Website Chair and Maintainer.
Twitter URL (if available): https://twitter.com/KatiMichel/
GitHub URL: https://github.com/KatherineMichel/
If accepted, your talk must be pre-recorded. It will be shared publicly via PyCon US and PSF communication channels and social media. (For more info, visit: https://us.pycon.org/2021/speaking/recording/.) *
Links to the blog posts, articles, etc. that the proposed talk will be based on
Links to the slides or videos of your previous presentations: https://github.com/KatherineMichel/portfolio#public-speaking
Any other info you would like to include