<html><head></head><body><div><div><div style="display: none; border: 0px; width: 0px; height: 0px; overflow: hidden; visibility: hidden;"><img src="https://r.superhuman.com/IqWdyHj4YZHfg0cwo_Ik4_TrUEybXlZO41ELBDBuO6lSgE-kYKcg9mrE1V1rP6KT8zXeGaHuA8TuT2uh7dWC5l3tj3JIikIcrJiH2fZy2JRtVtmrz8ieaNfVAEgGo9zy8lZqQvvpUG2WVsqiSIKO9HcOi2dAUAx2TlNBrPEGxacqVt9GKuJkZ4wQkVlbepjJC1sSdQ.gif" alt=" " width="1" height="0" style="display: none; border: 0px; width: 0px; height: 0px; overflow: hidden; visibility: hidden;"/><!--                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                --></div><div><div><div class="">Hi, Don! <br/></div><div class=""><br/></div><div class="">I would love to geek out with you about software maintenance and sustainability. I&#39;m the CEO of <a href="http://corgibytes.com" target="_blank">Corgibytes</a> and that&#39;s all we do. :) <br/></div><div class=""><br/></div><div class="">I&#39;m guessing since you&#39;re at GitHub, you&#39;re aware of the <a href="https://sustainoss.org/" target="_blank">Sustain</a> conference they hosted a couple of years ago? I was there along with about 75+ other OSS maintainers. I know they compiled a TON of notes. If you need me to dig up a contact for you, let me know. <br/></div><div class=""><br/></div><div class="">Here are some high-level thoughts to some of your questions, for the benefit of all on the thread. I&#39;d love to set up a time to chat in more detail if that would be useful to you. Also, here&#39;s a podcast I recorded with Andrew Russell. It&#39;s a good one to listen to: <a href="https://www.legacycode.rocks/podcast-1/episode/1c0e0b87/hail-the-maintainers-with-andrew-russell" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">https://www.legacycode.rocks/podcast-1/episode/1c0e0b87/hail-the-maintainers-with-andrew-russell</a><br/></div><div class=""><br/></div><div class=""><b class="">Are there lessons from other disciplines that could be applied to software maintenance? </b><br/></div><div class="">Aside from the obvious allegories, such as car mechanics and home improvement, one of the best metaphors I&#39;ve seen comes from the world of Opera. Jessica Kerr wrote <a href="https://the-composition.com/the-origins-of-opera-and-the-future-of-programming-bcdaf8fbe960" target="_blank">a fantastic longread</a> about it. <br/></div><div class=""><br/></div><div class="">Here&#39;s a quote: <br/></div><div class="">&#34;A<span class=""> </span><b class="">symmathesy</b><span class=""> </span>(sim-MATH-uh-see, coined by<span class=""> </span><a style="text-decoration-color:initial;text-decoration-style:initial;text-decoration-line:none;color:inherit;" rel="noreferrer" class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://norabateson.wordpress.com/2015/11/03/symmathesy-a-word-in-progress/" href="https://norabateson.wordpress.com/2015/11/03/symmathesy-a-word-in-progress/" target="_blank">Nora Bateson</a>) is a learning system made of learning parts. Software teams are each a symmathesy, composed of the people on the team, the running software, and all their tools.<br/></div><div class=""><br/></div><p style="text-decoration-color:initial;text-decoration-style:initial;margin-left:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-right:0;" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="8dd9" name="8dd9">The people on the team learn from each other and from the running software (exceptions it throws, data it saves). The software learns from us, because we change it. Our tools learn from us as we implement them or build in them (<a style="text-decoration-color:initial;text-decoration-style:initial;text-decoration-line:none;color:inherit;" rel="noreferrer" class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://www.humio.com/" href="https://www.humio.com/" target="_blank">queries</a>, dashboards, scripts,<span class=""> </span><a style="text-decoration-color:initial;text-decoration-style:initial;text-decoration-line:none;color:inherit;" rel="noreferrer" class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://atomist.com" href="https://atomist.com/" target="_blank">automations</a>).&#34; <br/></p><div class=""><br/></div><div class=""><b class="">What’s different about maintaining legacy software vs open source software?  </b><br/></div><div class="">I think it&#39;s easy to conflate the two, but they&#39;re fundamentally different things. Michael Feathers defines legacy code as code without tests. I take it a bit further and define it as code without trust. You don&#39;t trust the code, the people, the tests — and that makes it hard to work with. In order to make progress on a legacy system you have to start by rebuilding that broken trust, which means there can be a lot of inertia. When we take on a legacy project, one of the first things we do is start implementing the communication systems that are required for a successful OSS project — commit messages, code reviews, PRs, pruning issues/branches, and overall making the communication more transparent and asynchronous. We&#39;ve found those practices to have the most impact on a legacy system that wants to turn itself around. Then again, there are a lot of OSS projects that have fallen into disrepair. One common scenario I see is that the maintainer has a ton of knowledge in their brain and doesn&#39;t know how to communicate it so other people can help them. So when people come onto a project, they don&#39;t know how to plug in. </div><div class=""><br/></div><div class="">Do you know of interesting case-studies we should be aware of? <br/></div><div class="">Sean Larkin at WebPack. He attended a talk I gave about communication in software and then went onto the <a href="https://changelog.com/podcast/233" target="_blank">Changelog</a> to talk about how focusing on communication &amp; community engagement helped them grow. <br/></div><div class=""><br/></div><div class=""><b>Do _you_ maintain software, and have a story to share? </b><br/></div><div class="">SOOOO many stories! :) <br/></div><div class=""><br/></div><div class="">Here&#39;s a link to my calendar to find a time to chat if you wanted to hear about them: <a href="https://calendly.com/andreagoulet">https://calendly.com/andreagoulet</a><br/></div></div><br/><div class="gmail_signature"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">







<p><span><font size="2" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">To your success, </font></span></p>
<p><font size="2" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span>Andrea Goulet (she/her)<br/></span>Co-Founder &amp; CEO<br/>Corgibytes, LLC<br/>804.596.2375 x700<br/><a href="mailto:andrea@corgibytes.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">andrea@corgibytes.com</a><br/><a href="http://corgibytes.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">http://corgibytes.com</a> </font></p>
<p><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">Have you read my </span><i style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small"><a href="http://firstround.com/review/forget-technical-debt-heres-how-to-build-technical-wealth/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">First Round Review</a></i><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small"> article about paying off technical debt? </span><br/></p><p><font size="2" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">I was named one of <a href="https://lists.linkedin.com/2016/next-wave-top-professionals-35-and-under-20161011/software" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">LinkedIn&#39;s Top 10 Software Professionals under 35</a>. How cool is that?! </font></p><p><font size="2" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Love refactoring and TDD? Join us at <a href="http://LegacyCode.Rocks" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">LegacyCode.Rocks</a> for masterminds, podcasts, and more. <br/></font></p></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><br/></div></div><br/><div><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 10:08 AM, Don Goodman-Wilson <span dir="ltr">&lt;<a href="mailto:degoodmanwilson@github.com" target="_blank">degoodmanwilson@github.com</a>&gt;</span> wrote:<br/><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote sh-color-black sh-color" style="null" id="null">
<div style="font-size: 14px; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, sans-serif;" name="messageBodySection" class="sh-color-black sh-color">Howdy!
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<div class="sh-color-black sh-color">I’m Don Goodman-Wilson, co-chair of the Software Track for The Maintainers III. I&#39;m a recovering academic now working in the software industry at GitHub. One of my focus areas is discovering the best ways to support the maintainers of open source software (OSS). OSS provides the backbone for our digital lives (for better or worse), but such maintainers are increasingly finding themselves unsupported and under-appreciated. The result is that our digital infrastructure is in an incredibly delicate and precarious place, moreso than many realize.</div>
<div class="sh-color-black sh-color"><br/></div>
<div class="sh-color-black sh-color">I discovered The Maintainers at APIdays in Paris last December, where Mehdi and Andrew held a day-long unconference on sustaining maintainers—and I realized pretty quickly that I had found my people. In the Maintainers, I feel like I’ve found kindred souls who understand not only the gravity of the situation, but the urgency to find solutions in partnership with practitioners who really understand the challenges.</div>
<div class="sh-color-black sh-color"><br/></div>
<div class="sh-color-black sh-color">There are a lot of places where we could use your experience and expertise. Are there lessons from other disciplines that could be applied to software maintenance? What’s different about maintaining legacy software vs open source software?  Do you know of interesting case-studies we should be aware of? Do _you_ maintain software, and have a story to share? What existing institutions exist that could be extended to cover software, or that might have resources for software maintainers that we aren’t aware of? Does open source as a practice have the deck stacked against it, and maybe we need to fundamentally rethink the way we approach open, collaborative software creation for the public good?</div>
<div class="sh-color-black sh-color"><br/></div>
<div class="sh-color-black sh-color">If all this is new to you, there are a lot of interesting resources out there:</div>
<div class="sh-color-black sh-color">• <a href="https://github.blog/2019-01-17-lets-talk-about-open-source-sustainability/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">https:/<wbr/>/<wbr/>github.<wbr/>blog/<wbr/>2019-01-17-lets-talk-about-open-source-sustainability/<wbr/></a><br/></div>
<div class="sh-color-black sh-color">• <a href="https://medium.com/s/story/exploiting-developer-infrastructure-is-insanely-easy-9849937e81d4" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">https:/<wbr/>/<wbr/>medium.<wbr/>com/<wbr/>s/<wbr/>story/<wbr/>exploiting-developer-infrastructure-is-insanely-easy-9849937e81d4</a><br/></div>
<div class="sh-color-black sh-color">• <a href="https://words.steveklabnik.com/the-culture-war-at-the-heart-of-open-source" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">https:/<wbr/>/<wbr/>words.<wbr/>steveklabnik.<wbr/>com/<wbr/>the-culture-war-at-the-heart-of-open-source</a></div>
<div class="sh-color-black sh-color">• <a href="https://words.steveklabnik.com/what-comes-after-open-source" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">https:/<wbr/>/<wbr/>words.<wbr/>steveklabnik.<wbr/>com/<wbr/>what-comes-after-open-source</a></div>
<div class="sh-color-black sh-color">(I’d love to read more if you know other recent takes on the current state of open source software!)</div>
<div class="sh-color-black sh-color"><br/></div>
<div class="sh-color-black sh-color">Looking forward to seeing you at The Maintainers III!</div>
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<div style="font-size: 14px; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, sans-serif;" class="sh-color-black sh-color">Don GOODMAN-WILSON</div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, sans-serif;" class="sh-color-black sh-color">Developer Advocate, EMEA<br style="font-size: 14px; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, sans-serif;"/>
GitHub</div>
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