What project or projects do you maintain and what was your motivation for creating those projects and releasing them as open source software?

The last thing I released was teleport, which was a CLI app written specifically to teach how to build “useful” things in Haskell. When I started learning Haskell, I found it hard to learn how to put things together, which was why I wrote the tutorial. A lot of people seemed to like it, which I’m happy about :)

Right now, I’m writing graph-reduction, an implementation of a lazy functional language using a technique called “graph reduction”. There aren’t very many references on this, so I plan on writing a series of tutorials from the codebase. The only reference that exists is Implementing Functional languages, a tutorial and a couple of related papers.

I also need to experiment more with Reality Check, a Sublime Text plugin for feedback-as-you-type with Python. I have a couple of ideas, but I’m not sure in which direction I want to take it.

I’m maintaining the Haskell bindings to Symengine, but this has taken somewhat of a back seat the past couple of weeks since college just started.

If you created any of those projects, were they meant to solve a specific problem you faced, or were they born out of a larger opportunity you saw?

They were mostly for issues that I wanted to solve. Sometimes, I wrote things purely to teach people. Others were to fix workflows, libraries I wanted, etc.

How has the project evolved since you first got involved or first released it?

Some of the older projects I used to contribute to, such as PPSSPP, are doing splendidly. Others, like VisPy, are in a little bit of a slump due to the personal lives of everyone involved.

I think that is quite natural. Some projects hit critical mass and succeed, others slowly fade away; most of the time, due to reasons not entirely in our control.

How do you spend your time on those projects? (i.e. Developing, managing the community, triaging issues, etc.)

I spend most of my time writing documentation and taking care of issues and PRs.

Code is quite easy to write, but maintaining is a whole different ball game. I try to rotate between projects that I’m working on so I don’t burn myself out.

How would you describe the community around projects you participate in? What are your favorite and least favorite aspects?

I love the communities I particpate in in general, and how positive the people are. The Haskell community in particular has some of the most wonderful people I’ve ever met.

The X-factor of the Haskell community, as I see it, is the confluence of both super academic and super practical people, who work in tandem to create really elegant solutions.

My least favourite is maybe the perceived ivory-tower-ness of the community. I think it’s a difference in culture, but it needs to be bridged somehow.

What keeps you involved in those projects? Do you have long-term plans for maintaining your involvement?

I build things that I like and I use, so I see myself keeping them updated as long as I’m around. For some of my projects, I wound up sunsetting them and disbanding the team, since I couldn’t find anyone to maintain them. For larger projects, it’s okay to make nice PRs and then drop off the radar as life takes over.

I try to keep the Bus factor of anything I’m working on greater than 1.

What is the most important thing someone submitting an issue or patch should know?

The fact that the person on the other end is a real person, and some kindness goes a long way. Other than that, a descriptive patch / issue is always appreciated over “bug, please fix”.

What’s your development environment right now?

I’m on Mac OS mavericks. I use Vim, Sublime Text, and emacs as text editors depending on what I’m doing.

I do occasionally go back to Arch Linux on my desktop as I love the philosophy!

What was your first development environment? Do you miss anything from it?

My first “dev environment” as a kid was LOGO on Windows 95, as taught by dad :) First proper development environment was Visual C++. I don’t miss much, but I do miss the amazing debugging capabilities from time to time.

Though this isn’t strictly dev environment related, I miss my childhood environment of being a kid and having all the free time in the world!

Where do you see the open source software community headed?

That’s a tough one! I see people moving non-code oriented media to the open source model of collaboration since it has been hugey successful for code. It’s already happening with books like the Homotopy type theory book. Mathematicians are collaborating on the polymath project.

I think the main take away will be the “open source methodology” which I find super exciting. Computing is a young field, and it’s nice to see it influence other fields that are far older and more established. I hope this leads to richer interplay and sharing between these sciences.