Refining Your Project

Hi! I'm Hoverbear

Working for Asquera in Berlin, Germany
From Victoria, BC, Canada
Rust user since 0.6 nightlies
Organizer for RBR2016 and all RustFests
Helps maintain some random crates
Loves writing at hoverbear.org
I lost my first slides draft at 5AM today. Yay

This Workshop

Look at some data
Talk about the data results
Pair up
Try to use each other's stuff
???
GOTO 3

Some Data

I like asking questions! :)

Evaluating Crates

How do users evaluate crates to use in their own projects?

What is important?

Published on Crates.io
(Complete) Examples
A good API feel
Documentation (Crate/Trait/Struct level)
A responsive maintainer

What is not important?

Dependencies
Word of mouth
Talks/Presentations

These results were very surprising to me!

...wish more crates had?

Support both Stable and Nightly
Support Windows (Or mention it doesn't!)
Examples for most features (see clap)
Changelogs(!)
"Works well with..."
Justifications for `unsafe` blocks
Performance notes
NOT commiting on `master`

'Good'

Serde
Rocket
Rayon
Nom
Diesel
Clap
Byteorder

'Bad'

Iron (maintenance)
Rocket (nightly)
Tokio (docs)
Futures (docs)
gfx-rs (corner cutting)

Maintaining Crates

How do we create better crates?

What is prioritized?

Published (70% ranked critical)
API Feel
Documentaion (Higher than when evaluating!)
CI Builds (Not important when evaluating!)
Tests
Examples

Advertising

Reddit (71%)
Blog (35%)
Forums (38%)
Twitter (35%)
IRC/Chat (28%)
Meetups/Conferences (20%)

How can a crate help new users?

Show a roadmap for new features
Documentation
Examples
Metadata (for crates)
Links to more about the subject matter (!!)
Advice on how to get help
Sample projects (big examples)

Honor roll: "Nothing. I don't care for noobs" AKA someone who doesn't want users.

What do maintainers need to work on?

Better documentation
More internal linking
- Cited that it is hard/awkward to do with rustdoc
Examples
Fuzzing
Tests
Advertising
Finishing the last mile / polishing the crate

Note: New Contributors

Be willing to mentor them and help them evolve PRs.

"Have you ever sat with a new user as they used your crate?"

76% said no, but they want to!
9% said no, and they don't want to!
14% have!

So, let's sit together and try stuff!

Goals Today

Learn to improve our projects!
Learn how others learn!
Create lots of small, actionable improvements
Perhaps find new users and contributors. :)
Share new learnings with everyone else.

How we do it

Pair up with an observer and a user
User tries to find, learn about, and use observer's crate.
User is tasked with (or makes up) a project to expand an example from the crate.
User explains their internal monologue and thought process to observer. (Light prompting allowed)
Observer can not help without being explicitly asked.
Observer takes notes about stumbling blocks and confusing bits.
After about 20-30 mins, we change partners again after a short group sharing period.

What did we learn?

Refining Your Project

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