Being an Inclusive Project (and how GitHub saved my day)
I have posted over 50 posts here about Nikola and most of them contain something like "Nikola, my static blog/site generator". Well, that's not the case anymore. From now on I will say "a static blog/site generator". Why? Let's see.
For starters, it's no longer true that I wrote it. Although I am still pushing more code that anyone, there are 54 other contributors. That number is astonishing. Why? Because I estimate there are around 200 Nikola users. That means the ratio of contributors to users is incredibly high.
That is probably explained because the way you build a site using Nikola is very programmer oriented. You could describe a static site generator as a sort of "site compiler" and not be far off the mark. Many of the benefits, like you can host your page sources in github! are completely misterious to non-programmers. So, I expected that number to be high, but, having a 25% user=>developer conversion rate? That's bizarre.
So, I suspect I did some things well with this project [1], and wanted to think them out loud, and try to further them.
One thing I think I did well was that it's an inclusive project. If you propose something you are getting heard and I am giving the proposal a fair shake. I may reject it, but not out of hand, but instead after some thought. And if I am unsure, it's accepted. I would rather get something I am not fond of than drive out a contributor [2] because I may change my mind, but a contributor that's gone is not coming back.
Same thing about granting commit rights: want them? You get them with the first successful PR by just asking.
Today there was another step on this direction: I am not the sole admin anymore. No longer is https://github.com/ralsina/nikola the canonical repo, it's now https://github.com/getnikola/nikola. The website? Not http://nikola.ralsina.me but http://getnikola.com, paid for 5 years. Added two admins to everything (the awesome damianavila and Kwpolska). Gave up sole control of a loooong list of things [3] and now I can get run over by a bus and things should not bitrot.
It protects those 54 other contributors and few hundred users from my ever losing heart or interest, which is a real risk, and should be alleviated.
I think the most important bit about converting users into contributors though, is that you just need to be friendly. And Nikola is largely a friendly project. And that's made it a lot of fun for the past year or so.
I once read that if you refused to use code written by assholes you could not boot any OS. Well, that may be true, but that doesn't mean being an asshole is OK. This is a small project that does a small thing. But at least I feel confident it's not written by assholes. And that's a victory in itself.
OTOH there are some major defficiencies still. Diversity is good in some areas (geographically, for instance) but AFAIK the percentage of women contributing to the codebase is 0% and I have no idea why, and I would love to improve that.
So, lots of work done, lots more to do. That's a good position to be in, I think.
Github Alsina, ja!
btw, congrats for the move.
Bueno, capaz que de segundo nombre.
Roberto, thanks for all your work doing this transition... and thanks for ALL your work with the project.
You have built a very welcoming environment (not only to contribute), and as a consequence, you had got a lot of people interested and willing to make Nikola even better!
As a personal note... thanks for you confidence, I promise I will make my best if a bus hits you ;-) (I will also do my best whereas you are alive, he he)
Abrazo.
Damián
I'll try to look both ways before crossing busy streets :-)
You've done a great job on inclusion. I can tell that every one of my (questionable) feature requests gets a proper response.
I think some of the reason the contributor ratio is so high is because Nikola needs tweaking (or fixing) when you want too do anything but a basic blog - don't take this negatively because it actually means that people think Nikola is worth their time to contribute to. There are alternatives out there that they could use, but they don't want those!
As for female contributors, perhaps Nikola is just not big enough to have encountered female hackers yet. I haven't seen anything that should discourage them, only the opposite.
Congratulations on the transition!
Indeed making Nikola need less tweaking is a good priority to have.
I think it is better than it used to be and I have a few ideas like, pre-filled profiles in "nikola init" so you can start, say, a not-blog easily without tweaking configs first. Don't worry about feature requests, if I just implemented the things I needed I would have stopped in version 2 ;-)
Awesome! I really like Nikola, I feel comfortable with it and that's why I migrated mi blog from wordpress.com to Nikola. I tried once some time ago and the "import_wordpress" didn't exists. So, I asked you at #pyar and you say: "You can do it, if you want" and I say: "Sorry, I'm lazy and I don't want to start writing that now". Some days after that, you said: "Hey, man, I wrote something that you could try and let me know". I tried it, and it had some problems but you accepted my .xml with all of my posts, improved the script and tried again...
About a year after that, I said: "I'm going to take a look at Nikola again and I'll see how much it has improved" and... Man! It's awesome! I found just two stupid bugs (at least for me) that I could fix with a quick look at the "import_wordpress" code. Now, I'm a happy man blogging as much as I can again...
I had a similar experience with rst2pdf about a year ago also, I reported some bugs you worked on them for me (?)... and FOR FREE! :D . I really like the way that you start projects and listen to the people that want some change in your milestones. I really like your code and... I really like the way that you laught with your child inmediately after he start crying... That marked my life forever...
Hugs from here,
To be totally honest, @okin wrote most of the wordpress importer after I did that proof of concept :-)
Thanks for the kind words, too.
Awesome!. Congrats for this move, Roberto!. Nikola is amazing.
Grazie!
As user #7 my record here: I knew your name already, you had the right reputation to be somebody to want to work with. And then ReST all the way, rst2pdf is an awesome work of yours. Nikola was about using ReST for even more stuff, about integrating documentation and website in almost perfect way.
And your design for Nikola was pretty sound, or mostly, and where it was not, you aggressively took on the challenges imposed. And you have a lot of passion for it obviously.
Right now, I totally have a backlog to even look at the amount of new stuff that interests me, and that got added to Nikola. It's amazing. I definitely will submit a presentation about it.
To me Nikola is Python at its best.
Thanks for the kind words. Without you nagging me everytime I broke it, Nikola would not be what it is today ;-)