Mike Perham from Sidekiq (OSS Ruby background worker) has office hours every Friday for an hour. I've gone before and he was really helpful.
Open source projects should run office hours
51–60 of 279 posts
Re: Open source projects should run office hours
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks like you're drawing conclusions from the title, which I also did! Per the article, he's not saying you should work on the project during office hours. Instead, to get feedback from users, he's allocating some time where users can have a talk with him about the project. He's calling that 'Office Hours'. I think that it's a really valuable suggestion.
I don't understand what you're saying. How is time spent gathering feedback from users not time spent working on the project?
I think you're missing the distinction between "office hours" (what most people would read as 9-5 Monday through Friday) and "Office Hours", the term Simon is using to describe the 4-5 hours a week that he specifically allocates to having discussions with his users. Which is completely understandable given that there's not actually a consistent capitalisation difference.
Of course the latter is still time spent working on the project, but it's certainly not in direct conflict with having a full-time job paying the bills.
Re: Open source projects should run office hours
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the 'should' is targeted at developers who want their projects to grow (which is not all open-source developers).
To riff on this I think this weird expectation of projects to "grow" is a side effect of the increasing corporate influence on F/OSS. So many conference talks' second slide is a "numbers" slide wit how many github stars, active contributors and other vanity metrics. It strikes me that the point is not just to convey that the project has an ecosystem behind it (with the implication there being that you can get free fe…
Open source developers presumably tend to work on projects that they genuinely like and are passionate about. Aiming to help as many people as possible in a subject you're passionate about seems extremely natural to me.
Re: Open source projects should run office hours
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand what you're saying. How is time spent gathering feedback from users not time spent working on the project?
I think you're missing the distinction between "office hours" (what most people would read as 9-5 Monday through Friday) and "Office Hours", the term Simon is using to describe the 4-5 hours a week that he specifically allocates to having discussions with his users. Which is completely understandable given that there's not actually a consistent capitalisation difference. Of course the latter is still time spent worki…
It's more like office hours in the college sense where you go talk to the prof/ta to get your doubts cleared and stuff, the way i see it.
Re: Open source projects should run office hours
#55The Knative Project holds "Hacky Hours" every week on Fridays, 1-3pm Pacific Time[0]. It's a great opportunity for people to drop-in and ask questions, and for folks to show off what they've been working on.
[0] https://knative.dev/community/calendar/ , though check the @KnativeProject twitter account tomorrow because the video links are getting switched from Zoom to Google Meet to make it easier for more folks to join.
Re: Open source projects should run office hours
#56Why limit to open-source projects? What about ANY businesses.
Re: Open source projects should run office hours
#57Isn't this kind of a paradox? Most open source maintainers work in their free time on those projects, and have an additional fulltime job to cover the bills. Assuming that everybody has the luxury to have additional office hours available is a bit far from reality in my opinion. I mean, if you can offer office hours for an open source project you probably are already so popular that you are able to work on it fulltim…
If I consider US-times, being based in Japan, I can probably use my Saturday morning to answer support queries for free
Re: Open source projects should run office hours
#58Why limit to open-source projects? What about ANY businesses.
Red Hat holds a series of OpenShift office hour type segments as part of their OpenShift streaming calendar. The specific segments range from weekly to triweekly (every three weeks).
https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=redhatstreami...
Re: Open source projects should run office hours
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand what you're saying. How is time spent gathering feedback from users not time spent working on the project?
I think you're missing the distinction between "office hours" (what most people would read as 9-5 Monday through Friday) and "Office Hours", the term Simon is using to describe the 4-5 hours a week that he specifically allocates to having discussions with his users. Which is completely understandable given that there's not actually a consistent capitalisation difference. Of course the latter is still time spent worki…
Ah, I see what you mean. People generally wouldn't say "run office hours" to refer to the first sense. That might be "work office hours" or "standard office hours" or "keep office hours" perhaps.
Re: Open source projects should run office hours
#60Every team at work (AWS) has office hours, this is a great idea.