Chris Holdgraf

Chris Holdgraf

Data Science | Open Science | Brains

Recent Posts

Open communities need to be partners, not sources of free labor

11 minute read

Published:

In the last couple of years, we’ve seen an increasing number of organizations start to spawn products that take a largely open stack (e.g., the SciPy ecosystem) and wrap it in a thin layer of proprietary/custom interface + infrastructure. On the face of it, this isn’t a problem - I really want people to be able to make money using the open source stack - however, there is a big caveat. When you look at the work that those organizations have done over time, you often see a pretty thin trail of contributions back to those open source projects.

My weekly workflow

7 minute read

Published:

I’ve had a bunch of conversations with friends who were interested in how to keep track of the various projects they’re working on, and to prioritize their time over the course of a week. I thought it might be helpful to post my own approach to planning time throughout the week in case it’s useful for others to riff off of.

Signaling openness

7 minute read

Published:

How do open projects signal their “openness” to the outside community? This is a really hard question, particularly because nowadays “open” has become a buzzword that doesn’t just signal a project’s position to the community, but is also used as a marketing term to increase support, users, or resources.

I like Rust’s governance structure

9 minute read

Published:

Recently I’ve been reading up on governance models for several large-ish open source projects. This is partially because I’m involved in a bunch of these projects myself, and partially because it’s fascinating to see distributed groups of people organizing themselves in effective (or not) ways on the internet.

Using CircleCI to preview documentation in Pull Requests

4 minute read

Published:

Writing documentation is important - it’s the first point of contact between many users and your project, and can be a pivotal moment in whether they decide to adopt your tech or become a contributor.

Summer conference report back

6 minute read

Published:

This is a short update on several of the conferences and workshops over the summer of this year. There’s all kinds of exciting things going on in open source and open communities, so this is a quick way for me to collect my thoughts on some things I’ve learned this summer.

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