-- This is my talk from FOSS meetup Chennai March. This should be accepted only if there is a lack of other strong proposals--
This talk explores Eric Raymond's observations and anecdotes from the essay, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", and seeing how the principles he talked about shaped many projects and software as we see them today.
For the most part, the talk covers the basic principles from the essay that the audience can understand easily and then apply to their own projects. I hope to keep this interactive and find people in the audience who can explain if these principles worked for them unconsciously.
Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch. - Necessity is the mother of invention, we see why and how the need of a project (like linux) explains why its code quality is so high.
Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
‘‘Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow. ’ - Showing some poorly written code of my own, from personal projects' first iteration.
If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging. - Importance of getting out of the developer's bubble and understanding why its important to code from a user's perspective. This can also expand to UX, documentation and decisions in general
Release Early, Release Often
Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone. - Linus's law - Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. More users also find more bugs.
Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
Necessary pre conditions for the bazaar style ( things to keep in mind for developers building out products in the bazaar model)
We will then try to check if this model applies to some popular open source projects.
Apart from the essay, I also took inspiration from these talks -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS6IpvTWwkQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whnHYbQ0oZE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnYH1_l9Dtk