Eric Holscher - Posted in 2015

The Importance of Being Welcoming

2015-10-16T12:00:00+00:00

Conferences have been a fundamental part of me becoming a professional developer. Having a network of people you know personally in a professional context is a huge advantage. It helps getting jobs, they help you think through problems, and it’s important to help you identity as a member of the community.

There’s a problem though. It can be hard to integrate into these groups when you first show up. Even with a huge amount of conference experience, going to new events with new communities is nerve racking.

A few years ago, I learned a really important thing that conference organizers can do to make this easier.

Encouraging Courage

The hardest part for me is walking up to a group of people that I don’t know, or that I do know, and respect. I will generally default to sitting by myself or staring at my phone, instead of joining a conversation that would likely be quite interesting.

This all changed at XOXO. In the opening address, they explicitly gave me permission to join and interrupt groups of people.

This turned the interaction model on it’s head. I now boldly joined new groups, knowing that it was my job at the conference to do this. As a proper conference attendee, it was encouraged and expected of me.

As a member of a group chatting, it also made it much easier to welcome someone into the conversation. It set the tone and expected behavior for everyone at the event.

3 + 1 = <3

Similar to a Code of Conduct, giving people permission to act in ways that makes the conference more valuable is a fundamental role of the organizer.

I now do this at every conference I organize. Telling people how to act, and giving them permission to interact, fundamentally changes the conference experience.

Why I’m building a company: Structure

2015-05-25T12:00:00+00:00

There are a lot of reasons to build a new company. A large part of it is wanting something to exist in the world. However, there are ways to manifest things that don’t require a new company.

The idea of a company itself being important came to me mostly from Steve Jobs. The canonical biography talks a lot about him building the company specifically, with the below understanding:

Company: A structure to build sustainable culture and values that live beyond yourself.

This was something I’d understood in a partial way, but the book made the concept concrete.

Structure

I believe there is a lot wrong with the ways companies are currently structured. The biggest issue is the concept of a 40-hour work week. All creative people I know strife at the concept of working 40 hours a week.

Most folks admit they don’t have 40 hours of creative potential within a week. Usually they get about 4-5 hours a day, at most, of truly creative and productive time. Within a classic, officed, 9-5ish company, the rest is meetings, filler, and “fun”.

Exostructure

As much as you want to change a company, you can’t change the culture around the company, at least to start. The biggest element that can’t be changed immediately:

Monday-Friday 9-5ish availability
Weekends as time off

Luckily creativity loves constraints, and these are the constraints that I am working with.

Idea

Two separate working teams:

Monday-Wednesday Team
Wednesday-Friday Team
Working ~20 hours a week

The idea is that there are two separate teams working on either the same or similar projects. Wednesday would be the shared day where people would transfer knowledge and hand off projects which require handoff. It would also be for brainstorming, so people fresh from not working and folks deep in the project could work together.

I imagine this would work better on some teams than others, but I generally believe it would allow people to live better lives, and do better work.

It would also require a lot more documentation :)

Why?

I live for the woods. You may live for something else, but it is most certainly not work. I enjoy my work in a profound way, but work is only a subset of life. By promoting life outside of work, and giving people more time to live, we will all be happier.

Happier people build better products and companies.

Working less also requires more discipline. You have to kill your heroes, and work in the time meant for work to be done. A structure that reinforces balance provides the right incentive structure. If I can’t work all the time, the work has to be good, supportable, and documented.

Crazy?

We haven’t implemented this concept yet. I’d be curious of previous examples of this kind of structure working, or failing. I imagine there are subsets of a company where this might make perfect sense (customer support, operations), because there is a shared context. There are also likely situations where it wouldn’t work, but I’m really excited to try things like this.

Why build a company if it’s going to be like every other company?

Making Read the Docs Sustainable

2015-04-10T12:00:00+00:00

Today we are announcing a sustainability campaign to raise money for Read the Docs. Most of the information is available on the page there, but I wanted to shine a bit more light on my thinking about this process.

Open Source

I’ve considered myself a member of the Open Source Community for over 10 years. In that time, I’ve been influenced by a lot of projects. The Python and Django communities are the ones I’ve always held in the highest esteem.

Django in particular is an amazing example, because the BDFL’s have recently stepped down as leaders of the community. In my view this is the best possible outcome for a leader, to build such a community that they become replaceable. Seeing your work live on after you are done working on it is a magical thing.

Sustainable

I feel like Django in this context is a sustainable community. There are a large number of people involved in the development and ongoing maintenance. However, even with this success they recognized a need. They created their own fundraiser to help with work that often gets missed: administrative and community management tasks. These are things that volunteers generally aren’t willing or able to do.

This shows that even communities that are successful still have work that doesn’t make sense for volunteers. I believe Read the Docs is in a similar boat, though with a much less active community.

Read the Docs, sadly, is still heavily dependent on me being around to operate it. Our campaign to make it more sustainable is the first step towards hopefully fixing this situation. Operating and supporting the site has started to take most of my time, not leaving much room for building community and onboarding contributors. In fact, it leads to an implicitly hostile environment for new contributors, because nobody was around to help them, test their patches, and get changes into the codebase.

This has lead Read the Docs into a spiral, where I’m too busy to onboard new people, but there is an ever increasing demand for support. The site keeps growing larger, meaning there is also ever growing operational overhead. But the community isn’t growing, because there isn’t anyone there to help new people.

Solution

Our goal is to try and make Read the Docs more supported, and more welcoming to new contributors. With that in mind, we are raising $24,000 to allocate time for much needed user and operational support.

With money injected into the system, operational and user support can be handled in a more consistent way. This will make an environment that is more welcoming to new community members, along with offering a better experience for existing users.

If you want to see this experiment play out, I hope you will contribute to our sustainability campaign.

Money

Read the Docs has been a labor of love, but it needs to transition into just labor. As the service has grown, it deserves more resources than I can dedicate to it for free. Introducing money lets other people do work on Read the Docs that otherwise I am left doing, poorly, because I feel a responsibility for the service. Having more people and money in the project will make it better for everyone.

If you care about Read the Docs, I encourage you to get involved in the development or contribute money. It will make sure the service grows into something even more amazing.