Jorge Castro of Canonical gives a very enlightening talk about building a community around the development of Gwibber, a client written in Python by Ryan Paul of Ars Technica for microblogging sites such as Twitter and Identica.Some of the points Castro really drives home include:Recognizing what you as a developer are not good at and finding others to augment your skillsDelegating tasks or authority to others to ease project stress/managementSetting behavioral expectations for developers, contributors, and community participantsCommunicating intentions between developers and community, not just developersEstablishing a roadmap for both the product and its communityChoosing a popular platform which has its own community with help availableThinking of releases, schedules, and downstream distributorsOne of the major points he drove home was regarding "tool wankery," in which developers spend more time worrying about or learning tools than actually developing a product. He stressed the importance of learning the tools, but not focusing on them.BIOS LEVEL highly recommends this talk to any intrepid developer looking to start an any development project--closed source or open--and even some seasoned developers who need the occasional reminder of where they came from.
BIOS LEVEL is a software and hardware review site with an open source slant. While we don't focus solely using hardware and software with open source, we do including testing and such using it. We often post videos along with our product reviews.
