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On the 10th June 2024 I gave a presentation to LRUG, the London Ruby Users Group, about being a software maintainer for the OpenStreetMap website codebase. The description of the talk was:
Maintaining one of the world’s largest non-commercial websites, OpenStreetMap, is a unique challenge. We’re a small, volunteer-based development team, not professional software developers. I will illustrate some of these challenges with a mixture of technical and organisational tips, tricks and recommendations, that you might find useful for your own teams and projects too.
Here’s a video that the team at LRUG kindly made (32 mins) which has the audio and the slides, and below that you’ll find the transcript.
Hi everyone, my name is Andy. Every Wednesday is my volunteering day, it’s when I step away from normal work and I do some volunteer development work. So in the mornings I head to my desk, I open up the OpenStreetMap website github repo page and I have a quick check to see if there’s any pull requests that need my review.
Yeah there’s a few, there’s a few more, in fact there’s loads. At the moment we have 137 open pull requests, more than 500 open issues and you might be thinking the same as me which is where on earth do I even start!
