jQuery Open Source (Fronteer 2011)
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This document discusses best practices for supporting users of open source projects based on jQuery's experience. It emphasizes providing documentation, tutorials, community support and an open development process to help users learn and succeed with the tool from their first day of use through becoming long-term contributors. Key aspects include simplifying the first experience, answering questions, addressing all skill levels, and enabling extensibility to keep users engaged over time.
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jQuery Open Source (Fronteer 2011)
- 1. jQuery Open Source Process John Resig http://ejohn.org/ - http://twitter.com/jeresig
- 5. Things That Are Important ✦ Technical ✦ API Design (Usability, documentation) ✦ Code Quality (Licensing, openness, test coverage) ✦ Non-technical ✦ Community (Resources, responsiveness) ✦ Learning Aides (Tutorials, books, demos)
- 6. What it all boils down to... ✦ How quickly can you get your user hooked - are you giving them room, and the resources, to grow? ✦ Put yourself in your user’s shoes.
- 7. Se In H co te om nd gr ep at Ap io ag p n e Ex Vi pl AP ew or ID Tu eA oc t or PI s ial Co D m ow Ex te m nl un oa nd i ty d AP I Tr Re Tu t y Tu ad or t ial or So s ial ur ce The First Year: Growth The First Month: Learning The First Day: Can this help me? Co nt Ex Ex rib pe pe ut r im r im e en en t t Watch the full process
- 8. Attrition Failure at any step costs your project another user. Your project is your own worst enemy.
- 9. The First Day “After spending less than 3 hours reading blog posts and perusing the documentation I was able to do a lot more in a lot less time then ever before. The huge community and neatly organized jQuery plugins make me feel like a sucker for not having jQuery for my pet-project.” http://aleembawany.com/2009/01/16/switching-from-prototype-to-jquery/
- 10. Homepage ✦ Set a good first impression ✦ Answer the questions: ✦ What is this? ✦ What can it do for me? ✦ Where can I go to learn more?
- 12. Getting Started Tutorial ✦ Clear, focused ✦ Assume no background knowledge
- 13. Download ✦ Make it super-easy, remove any barriers ✦ (We link straight to the source, no .zip)
- 14. Licensing ✦ Not a concern for some of people ✦ A huge concern for a lot of corporate users ✦ Use the most-open license possible ✦ Fewest number of restrictions gives you the largest possible market ✦ We use the MIT license for jQuery ✦ “Leave my name on the source file”
- 15. Try the Tutorial ✦ ...and subsequent Experimentation ✦ All about code quality ✦ For JavaScript libraries: Make sure your code is seamless across browsers ✦ For desktop apps: Is it truly cross- platform? Are there dependencies? ✦ The user should never be forced to ask for help in order to get started ✦ Asking for help “getting started” is a failure case on your end
- 16. Simplicity ✦ Simple APIs are king ✦ Users understand quicker ✦ Get started faster ✦ Become advanced quicker
- 17. The First Month “Alright I am now really really into jQuery. I used to hate javascript. WHAT HAS HAPPENED HERE? Javascript people, speak to me.” http://twitter.com/_ralph/status/1123503553
- 18. Community Resources ✦ Provide places for users to ask questions ✦ jQuery: ✦ jQuery Forum ✦ IRC Channel ✦ External: ✦ StackOverflow.com ✦ Twitter ✦ Blogs
- 19. Monitor Your Community ✦ Make sure that everyone is getting the help that they need ✦ We run an Evangelism Team “Developer Relations” ✦ Track all of the services they use ✦ Forum - Subscribe to the forums ✦ IRC - Sit in the IRC channel ✦ Blogs - Use Technorati and Google Blog Search ✦ Twitter - Use Twitter Search
- 20. Service Treat every user as a potential, future, contributor.
- 21. Service ✦ Today Mike Alsup and Michael Geary are part of the jQuery team
- 22. Twitter Tracking ✦ Track people talking about the code: ✦ http://search.twitter.com/ ✦ Look for people having trouble, asking questions
- 23. Answer Questions ✦ It takes a lot of time, but sometimes it’s really worth it ✦ You never know who could be having trouble
- 24. Follow-up With Large Users ✦ Maintain a list of contacts with your large users ✦ Ping them every once in a while ✦ Make sure that they’re having a good experience ✦ They frequently forget to file bugs - make sure that happens
- 25. API Documentation ✦ jQuery had API docs from the start (2006) ✦ Two other major libraries: Dojo, Prototype didn’t have any until 2007+ ✦ Clarity and usability of documentation is huge
- 26. API Example
- 28. Alternate Views
- 29. Learn More ✦ Tutorials and Books ✦ Tutorials are short and drive home a point or single topic ✦ “Books” are more holistic and lead the reader from start to finish
- 30. Tutorials New Learning Site Coming!
- 31. Getting Involved
- 32. Open Process ✦ Open Source is easy (just release the code and be done with it) ✦ Open Process is hard (open source control, easy bug tracking) ✦ A good process helps users learn
- 33. Core Development Process ✦ Weekly, public, team meetings ✦ Defined release dates and schedule ✦ Frequent discussion in #jquery-dev (IRC) ✦ Active participation of the committers and the bug triage team
- 36. Testing ✦ A distributed team testing against dozens of browsers ✦ Must have a top-notch test suite ✦ ...and distributed testing capabilities ✦ We use Test Swarm
- 37. Test Swarm
- 38. Test Swarm
- 39. Test Swarm on IRC
- 40. Browser Stack
- 41. Browser Stack
- 42. Bug Triage Team ✦ Responsible for processing all the bugs in the bug tracker ✦ Make sure test cases are filed ✦ Work through pulls in the Github pull request queue ✦ Make sure the test suite is passing
- 44. Bugs (cont.)
- 45. Roadmap Decisions ✦ Put up a public form for people to submit possible feature suggestions ✦ The team works through all the feature suggestions and creates a list ✦ All of this is done publicly and discussed in a public meeting
- 46. Roadmap
- 47. Contributions ✦ How does a user become a contributor? ✦ Encouragement is the biggest factor ✦ Encourage users to submit bug reports ✦ Encourage them to build test cases ✦ Encourage them to submit patches ✦ Communication is a huge factor here, “dead” bugs or mailing list threads cripple participation. ✦ http://docs.jquery.com/Getting_Involved
- 48. Missing Features
- 49. Extensibility ✦ Your API isn’t perfect - it can’t include everything for everyone ✦ Give users the ability to add their own functionality ✦ jQuery has a healthy plugin community with hundreds of plugins. ✦ We’re working on a new plugins site!
- 50. Complex Applications ✦ Users will attempt to build increasingly complex applications ✦ Need to be there to help, otherwise they’ll leave for something else ✦ jQuery UI - A set of complex User Interface components. ✦ jQuery Mobile - A complete interface for developing mobile web apps.
- 51. jQuery UI
- 52. jQuery Mobile
- 54. Overview ✦ Help your users at every step of the way ✦ Track them and help the stragglers ✦ Help them grow and flourish ✦ http://swarm.jquery.org/ ✦ Questions? ✦ jeresig@gmail.com