Open source is hard or how I made one OSS developer’s life a bit easier.

If you ever maintained any popular open source project I bet you know how hard it is. Tons of pull requests, issues, mailing lists and so on. Sometimes (or almost all the time) people don’t bother reading CONTRIBUTING.md files and post all their questions, requests, bad bug reports to the issue tracker. And you have to answer on all these tickets if you want to keep your project alive.

Now I want to talk about one specific project. It’s a ruby gem called Devise. Here’s just a little decription:

Devise is a flexible authentication solution for Rails based on Warden:

— Is Rack based; — Is a complete MVC solution based on Rails engines; — Allows you to have multiple models signed in at the same time; — Is based on a modularity concept: use just what you really need.

It has over 9000 stars on Github and you can find this gem in almost every Rails project that has authentication system.

Right now this project has about 2700 closed issues on Github. 2700 issues that were resolved by few people. And one of these people is José Valim. Just look at this guy’s public contribution graph:

That longest streak…

So José is one of the core developers of Devise gem. When I started follow this gem on Github I noticed that José answers on the same question with the same answer almost every day and I thought why not to automate this process for him. And I created José vs OSS plugin for Chrome and FF browsers:

As you can see this plugin just adds 6 additional buttons to the Github’s comment form. Here’s some information about what some of these buttons do:

• Sample app button — post comment with the following text: Can you please provide a sample application that reproduces the error?
• Wiki button — close an issue with the following text: The wiki is maintained by the community. So if there aren’t any up to date instructions, we recommend you to explore the solution yourself and hopefully contribute your findings back!
• Mailing list button — close an issue with the following comment: Please use the mailing list or StackOverflow for questions/help, where a wider community will be able to help you. We reserve the issues tracker for issues only.
• Bad bug report button — close an issue with the following comment: You need to give us more information on how to reproduce this issue, otherwise there is nothing we can do. Please read CONTRIBUTING.md file for more information about creating bug reports. Thanks!

All these messages were designed based on responses that José was posting on Devise’s issue tracker on daily basis. So now if someone posts a bad bug report (bug reports without information that is necessary to resolve problem) maintainer doesn’t have to type it all over again, he just click one button.

I wish this feature will be available for all Github users someday.