🔴New issue of The Optimist Engineer newsletter @optimistengineer

The Bus Factor represents the risk of having all the knowledge, that is critical for your business (either a company or a dev team), in one single person or a small set of people. In today's issue, I share my experience about this and some advice to avoid this happening

https://open.substack.com/pub/optimistengineer/p/how-to-melt-the-bus-factor-on-your?r=nw9bj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

#optimistengineer #experience #growth #share #engineer #softwareengineering #softwaredevelopment #startup #busfactor #learnings #techlead

What is a typical bus factor on your personal side projects?

How do you go about increasing it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

#poll #survey #SideProjects #projects #BusFactor #webdev #developers

LinkedIn users will post pictures of a eulogy with text like "Management finally forced them to take their vacation. They'll be missed by the team. Looking forward to resuming the hustle with them on the next plane 😔 #postmortem #busfactor" rather than go to therapy.

@ariadne You've addressed the #BusFactor? Good going.

When some of the biggest / most popular #Mastodon instances really start lagging it seems like it would be nice if some major organizations like CBS News would make some substantial #donations to mastodon.social and journa.host to ease the pains of the #TwitterMigration / #MastodonMigration, lest new users give up out of frustration with seeing blank screens, then maybe the most de facto important instances will grow a higher #BusFactor rather than every newsroom reinventing the hosting wheel

@ij Possibly side-tracking, but I'm curious: do you have, plan to have or consider having a team of moderators? My impression (as a user) is that doing both the admin job and the moderation job is quite time-consuming. Also, a risky thing to have a #BusFactor of 1.

@jerry I'd tried setting up a resource for Google+ refugees, which ... turned out to be hard.

Lessons learned, however, at https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Main_Page.

Related subreddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/

I've been meaning to compile a set of lessons learned, of possible interest to you and perhaps @evacide (I'd initiated contacts w/ EFF a ways back but dropped that ball).

• Community is a lot harder to preserve than content. Existing social media platforms aren't just the publisher but the directory.

• Move to an established platform. Even if it's not ideal, something that's up right now beats the heck out of still-in-development (or not even that) options.

• Mailing lists are highly underappreciated. They offer an out-of-band universal contact mechanism: email addresses.

• Though managed migration of community is hard ... informal migration can still be surprisingly effective if people know where to find you. Post VERY PROMINENT NOTICES of where you'll be moving to.

• #SIGNALFLARE was a mechanism created and employed heavily at G+. The hashtag, plus a set of contacts and alternate platforms at which you could be found was encouraged. I'd compiled many of those in a Notable Names Database: https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/G%2B_Notable_Names_Database

• Once a platform has either announced it will be shutting down, or appears quite likely to do so for other reasons, the best thing to do is to establish alternative presences sooner rather than later.

• In fact, better than that is to have a multi-platform strategy from the start. Do NOT put all your eggs in one basket. (Jerry with mailing list, blog, podcast, Twitter, and Mastodon presences is an exemplar here.)

• There's a notion of three types of people in an emergency: 1) deer in the headlights, 2) show us what to do, and 3) this ship's unsinkable. Numbers 1 & 3 can't be helped, group 2 are your squad. (There are also a few other categories, including griefers and profiteers/opportunists.) For a platform migration, the good news is that few people are likely to die, so groups 1 & 3 will eventually rediscover the main body, but during the transition they're of less than no use.

• People do in fact die. The refugee Diaspora* instance for G+ refugees, Pluspora.com, failed after its admin died, without any continuity / transfer-of-leadership plan. Joindiaspora, the original Diaspora* instance, after both technical debt and an AWOL admin meant that it was no longer viable. #BusFactor is a real problem, continuity needs addressing.

There's more I could write, this is probably a good start.

#TwitterExodus #Plexodus #CommunityMigration #CommunityContinuity #SwitchingPlatforms

#SQLite #RichardHipp #Corecursive
- The Battleship
- NP-Complete Problems
- Building #SQLite V1
- #Motorola Phones
- #AmericaOnline Phones
- #SymbianOS and #Nokia
- The #BusFactor and the Consortium
- Enter #Android
- Guys, This Is Important
- Testing and Aviation Standards
- Billions of Tests
- Building From First Principles
- B-Trees and the Art of #Computer #Programming
- #Freedom to Build It Yourself
- Building #Fossil
- Being Self Sufficient
- Advice for Others
https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/

Voilà, résultat covid positif de la personne, donc pas de réunion et pas de vidéo.

Allez, bisous.
#BusFactor

RT @StephanJanosch@twitter.com

In case you feel lonely in your research software engineering project with #busfactor 1, I can highly recommend organizing a national #RSE conference together with an awesome team.

So much interaction and opportunities to learn new things!

You won't be bored! X-D

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/StephanJanosch/status/1123267131276177413