Title: The Art of Supportability

Description:

Everyone has heard the phrase “Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live”. But fear is never the best way to motivate people to build supportability into their projects. In this talk we’ll discuss tips for writing and publishing software code which is easier for other people to support, whether they are open source contributors or current colleagues.
We’ll cover:

• The importance of clean code
• The usefulness of examples you can copy and paste
• What makes for great documentation
• Quick and polite responses to issues and pull requests
• Making your project easy to use out of the box
• Why empathy for others is critical for projects which can be supported by a wide group of people

The audience should come away with:

• A good list of common pitfalls to avoid when writing supportable code
• Examples of common traits of successful projects.
• Knowledge of how to better promote co-operation, especially for open source projects