konklone
commented
9 years ago At what point can I stop making forward progress on Sendak and fix a piece of software that Sendak uses, in a way that makes me happier (read: more productive) as a user of that software, but which is not explicitly required for Sendak to move forward? (generally the term for this is "technical debt", and there is often gross hostility towards paying down debt when something is already "working.")
There should never be "gross hostility" towards paying down technical debt here. We have to maintain the space for our engineering and devops teams to do more than just rush through every project and tool getting it to work as fast as possible. If you detect such hostility, hopefully we can talk about that as a team. If need be, we could also add a paragraph to the team guidance doc that makes that explicit.
More generally, teammates' judgment about how to manage 18F's open source libraries should be granted a lot of leeway. If a refactoring or feature makes the tool easier for 18F to use in its work, and the teammate doing it is otherwise meeting their duties, then that's time well spent for 18F and the taxpayer.
To clarify a little on the provenance of the software: when it was clear I needed to write these pieces of software, and I knew that I Jane, a member of the public, would want to use them later (for non-government things), I went and wrote them on my own time (weekends, evenings, etc). The reason for this is everywhere I have worked previously has as a stipulation of my employment owned everything I wrote, I wanted to be sure I had access to it afterwards. Obviously, I misunderstood 18F's "ownership" of things, as @konklone has added the lovely CC0-1.0 license.
We haven't taken the time to write down explicit guidelines on this stuff, and this isn't the most rigorous set of them, but I think generally:
- If you're creating a repo because it's primarily for your 18F work, and the work you perform in it is primarily to benefit 18F, start the repo's life in the 18F organization. It's okay if you also think it'll be helpful in personal work.
- If you're creating a repo that isn't primarily for 18F work, but you think will likely see use at 18F, start it in your personal account. If you don't have strong feelings or concerns about ownership, consider using CC0 to save yourself even having to ever think about it.
- As people open issues and request features (no matter whether the repo is in your account or 18F's), continue to exercise professional judgment about how to spend 18F time. If you think something will benefit 18F and is worth the time, then that's valuable 18F work. If it won't benefit 18F but makes the library better for other uses, maybe that's best done with personal time.
The worst case in misjudging a repo's origin or primary use is either forking or transferring a repository, which aren't big deals. I tend to CC0 my personal libraries anyway, especially when I think they may be helpful in government, which lets everyone Just Relax.
This is just me putting down a first draft of my own personal take -- curious how others think of it.
cc @kaitlin @NoahKunin @benbalter
benbalter
afeld
Before I was able to "write" Sendak, I needed a couple things:
There are other projects, but these two (
riak-dcwith ~400 downloads in the last month, anddeep-grepwith ~200 downloads in the last month, respectively) have gotten more attention than I expected at this early stage of development.The problem I am having, with respect to "open source software" here is that people are now using this software for things other than Sendak.
riak-dcis the only actively supported node.js driver for the object datastore ("NoSQL" Database), Riak; there are others that exist but which are abandonware, are undocumented, and hard to use. Since node.js lacks a useful "grep" function, and people on irc (where I often go for support myself) are frequently asking "how do I find the thing I want in an object of arbitrary nesting/complexity?" (among other things), there are now users employingdeep-grepin their own projects (it's not clear to me whether any of these are "in production") and opening issues on github as well as asking for help on irc.riak-dcis now linked to from the documentation forriak-js, which is the "unofficial official node.js driver for riak," as being not only simpler to use but supported and documented.I am given, generally, very clear tasking; I have milestones for Sendak and it is clear to me what needs to be done in terms of my responsibilities for 18F. There is ambiguity, however, when a problem arises in a library I maintain for Sendak (there are now 5-6); what if Sendak "is already doing what it needs to," but I am struggling with an API or interface that is poorly, improperly, or not documented? Buggy? At what point can I stop making forward progress on Sendak and fix a piece of software that Sendak uses, in a way that makes me happier (read: more productive) as a user of that software, but which is not explicitly required for Sendak to move forward? (generally the term for this is "technical debt", and there is often gross hostility towards paying down debt when something is already "working.")
In the event that there is an actual bug that impedes functionality in Sendak (there have certainly been a couple), I go and I fix it as I would any other piece of open source software.
But I am unclear where the line on "nice-to-have" features that I would like to have, as a use of the software, that would make it into Sendak, but perhaps not today, is drawn. What about when a user ("the public") says that if an interface returns keys and values, it should probably also return tuples, and I agree with them? At what point is it "okay" to go and write those features in my capacity as an employee of the government?
To clarify a little on the provenance of the software: when it was clear I needed to write these pieces of software, and I knew that I Jane, a member of the public, would want to use them later (for non-government things), I went and wrote them on my own time (weekends, evenings, etc). The reason for this is everywhere I have worked previously has as a stipulation of my employment owned everything I wrote, I wanted to be sure I had access to it afterwards. Obviously, I misunderstood 18F's "ownership" of things, as @konklone has added the lovely CC0-1.0 license.