Ollert, the Trello data analytics tool, has been open sourced under GNU Affero GPL v3.0. The source code can be found on Github and I’ve already accepted several pull requests.
Why?
I’ve been working towards this for a few months now. Although Ollert was a lot of fun to create and has helped quite a few people learn more about their Trello boards, I’ve been having trouble finding the time to write new features in between my other pursuits. Although SEP has given me resources in the past, it’s not always easy to find people off-project who have the right experience, determination, and time to grok the codebase and start churning out new features.
An interesting pattern started to appear: With every other feature request I received for Ollert, the requestor would add in some other loaded question: Where is the source code? Is there a Github repo so I can add issues? Do you accept pull requests?
Random strangers on the internet wanted to help. These are people with the drive to work with me even though I couldn’t give them anything in return. These are people with fresh perspectives on Trello usage which I had never imagined. These are the developers whose help I sorely wanted.
Feature requests?
I am still accepting feature requests. Feature requests are now dealt with through our issues page.
Contributing?
- Write tests
- Run tests
- Seriously, the travis-ci build had better be green.
- Follow the currently in-place patterns. If you don’t like them, let me know your idea before you work for a week and I deny your changes.
- Create issues for whatever you’re working on.
- We do things by pull requests. Make a fork, make a branch, let Github do the rest.
And so, it continues…
This does not mean I am abandoning Ollert. Internally we’ll still be discussing how to increase traffic and improve user experience. Hopefully, open sourcing Ollert will give us invaluable feedback on the code and fresh perspectives on features. I’m looking forward to the future of Ollert.
