feat: import blog posts by AdiatiAyu (#385)

* feat: add a blog post about issue management

* feat: add a blog post about maintainer onboarding process

* feat: add a blog post about getting pr reviewed and merged faster

* feat: add a blog post about the importance of documentation

* feat: add a blog post about issue forms and pr templates

blog/2024/2024-03-05-collaborate-conquer-grow-mastering-the-art-of-issue-management-for-open-source-projects.md

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+---
+title: "Collaborate, Conquer, & Grow: Mastering the Art of Issue Management for Open Source Projects"
+tags:
+  [
+    "open source",
+    "open source issue",
+    "open source issue management",
+    "open source maintainers",
+  ]
+authors: AdiatiAyu
+slug: issue-management-for-open-source-projects
+description: An open-source maintainer needs to be able to prioritize issues wisely and decide when to delegate or handle them in-house.
+---
+
+Have you ever faced a dilemma as a maintainer, wondering whether to tackle an issue yourself or create an issue for the community to solve?
+
+Knowing when to delegate tasks and involve external contributors is crucial for empowering contributors, fostering a healthy community, and keeping your sanity intact. However, there are also tasks that only the core team may and can handle.
+
+<!-- truncate -->
+
+In this article, I will walk you through prioritizing issues wisely and deciding when to delegate or best handle them in-house.
+
+## Prioritizing Issues: A Clear Roadmap to Success
+
+Before deciding to delegate or tackle an issue, you must learn how to prioritize it. With a mountain of issues, effective prioritization is crucial. How do you know what to tackle first?
+
+It would help if you considered these factors to prioritize issues:
+
+- **Severity**: Critical bugs, security vulnerabilities, and blockers must be addressed first.
+- **Impact**: How many users are affected? Issues impacting a large user base deserve your quick attention.
+- **Difficulty**: Can the issues be resolved quickly, or will they require significant effort? Consider prioritizing these based on the time and resources that you have.
+- **Alignment with project goals**: You want to focus more on issues that contribute to the project's vision rather than nice-to-have ones.
+- **Community interest**: If a feature request has high community engagement, such as active discussions, and receives enough potential support, you might want to consider prioritizing it.
+
+Now, you know how to prioritize issues. Next, we will dive into which issues are best to delegate and which are best for you to work on yourself.
+
+## Empowering Your Community: When to Delegate
+
+Most of the time, writing an issue is more challenging and time-consuming than working on it yourself. But if you handle everything alone, you will get burnt out quickly.
+
+Remember, the key to open source is the community. Delegating issues to the contributors can bring fresh perspectives, lighten your workload, and foster a sense of ownership within the community.
+
+Now, the question is: What kind of issues do you better delegate?
+
+- **Bug fixes**: Clear, reproducible bugs with minimal scope are perfect for contributors to tackle. You need to ensure that these bugs are not affecting the functionality of the current state of your project, even without being fixed immediately. These types of bugs are usually related to UI performance.
+- **Documentation improvements**: Updating documentation, adding tutorials, or fixing typos and grammatical errors can be tackled by anyone with a keen eye and contributors with writing skills.
+- **Small feature additions**: Well-defined, self-contained features are perfect for contributors looking to expand their portfolio. You must ensure these features align with your project's vision and scope.
+- **Testing**: Do you need to test specific functionalities or add test coverage to your project? These tasks, while crucial, can often be delegated.
+
+To manage these issues, you can label them with `bug`, `feature`, `testing`, `help wanted`, etc., depending on the issue type.
+
+Always remember that contributors volunteer their time to help you maintain and enhance your project. So, when time is sensitive, consider handling them in-house rather than rushing contributors to finish the issue promptly.
+
+Delegating issues is one of the ways to attract new contributors to your project and build your contributor pipeline. Contributors come and go; you want more contributors to stick around and contribute more after their first pull request for the sustainability of your project.
+
+Delegating issues will help contributors understand your project and its codebase better, and it help you offload some of your work and build a vibrant community.
+
+## Maintaining the Core: Issues Best Handled In-House
+
+Even though delegation is important in open source, some issues need to be handled immediately and can be complex and too sensitive to be taken by external contributors.
+
+There are three major factors that you need to consider when deciding to handle issues in-house:
+
+1. **Time**: When a problem needs to be addressed and handled quickly, or you need to ship a feature within a deadline, you want to take this on yourself. It's best to refrain from putting time pressure on contributors.
+2. **Complexity**: The core team has more context about a feature and has a bigger picture about the direction of the production. Consider handling this in-house when you need to work on something complex.
+3. **Continued communication**: Issues that require continued and regular communication between maintainers to update the progress and make prompt decisions in the process, potentially taking place outside GitHub for efficiency, are usually best left to core members.
+
+"In-house" doesn't necessarily mean the tasks can only be tackled by the core team. You might have that one contributor who is a well-known community member because of their work and contributions. They regularly ship quality work, know the codebase and documentation inside out, and are familiar with your project's workflow. You know you can trust these types of contributors with the in-house tasks. However, when time is essential, you want to refrain from giving the task to them and let the core team do that instead.
+
+Here are some types of issues that are best handled in-house:
+
+- **Critical bugs**: When a bug has affected the functionality of the whole project, you can consider it critical or high priority. This kind of bug can't wait and has to be fixed immediately.
+- **Architectural decisions**: Major changes to the project's core structure or direction require your deep understanding.
+- **Security vulnerabilities or privacy concerns**: This type of issue is sensitive, and protecting user data is your top priority. So, you need to fix these kinds of issues yourself.
+- **Complex refactoring**: Extensive code overhauls often need your experienced perspective and in-depth understanding of the codebase. It requires careful planning and analysis for efficient, maintainable, and scalable code.
+- **Creating or modifying guidelines**: The rules of your project and how to contribute to it are yours to determine. Having more people outside your team to throw ideas can cause you to drift away from your original intention and direction.
+
+Consider labeling these types of issues with `core team work`, `critical` or `high priority` to inform that these will be handled in-house.
+
+## Conclusion
+
+Mastering issue management is a game-changer for open source maintainers, but it is also an ongoing process. Adapt your strategies as your project evolves, ask for community feedback, and don't be afraid to experiment to find the best approaches. By doing so, you can transform issue management into a powerful tool for community engagement and project success.

blog/2024/2024-04-18-the-missing-piece-why-your-project-needs-a-maintainer-onboarding-process.md

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+---
+title: "The Missing Piece: Why Your Project Needs a Maintainer Onboarding Process"
+tags:
+  [
+    "open source",
+    "open source maintainers",
+    "open source maintainers onboarding",
+    "onboarding process",
+  ]
+authors: AdiatiAyu
+slug: open-source-maintainer-onboarding-process
+description: Learn about the importance of onboarding open source maintainers.
+---
+
+In the open source community, we often focus on contributor onboarding. We ensure a clear README, contributing guidelines, and a welcoming community to guide new contributors and help them get started. But what about maintainers?
+
+<!-- truncate -->
+
+Maintainers are the backbone of any open source project. They review code, merge pull requests, triage issues, and keep the project moving forward. Just like contributors, maintainers also come and go. They may have other commitments outside the project or experience burnout due to the role's demands.
+
+When I joined a maintainers team, we all started doing what we thought best. However, without a clear standard or guidelines, it quickly became chaotic. We each had our way of doing things, and there was little consistency in handling tasks.
+
+This lack of standardization made it confusing for new maintainers like me. I often felt unsure of the "right" way to do things and had to rely on asking my team for guidance, which wasn't always efficient. It made me wonder, "Why don't we have clear guidelines for maintainers, just like we do for contributors?" From there, these [maintainer guidelines](https://docs.opensauced.pizza/contributing/opensauced-maintainers-guide/community-maintainers-guide/) were born.
+
+Based on this experience, I will share with you the importance of having maintainers' guidelines and how to create one in this article.
+
+## From Confusion to Clarity: Why Onboarding Guidelines Matter
+
+Maintainer onboarding guidelines are crucial for several reasons.
+
+- **Clear role and responsibilities**: Onboarding guidelines provide a clear understanding of the role and its responsibilities. Each project is unique, and maintainers need to know what is expected of them specifically within that project.
+- **Standardization and Consistency**: Guidelines ensure consistency in handling tasks. Without them, each maintainer may have their own way of doing things, leading to confusion and inefficiency. Standardized processes make it easier for maintainers to collaborate and ensure the project runs smoothly.
+- **Knowledge Transfer**: Onboarding documentation serves as a valuable resource for future maintainers. It captures the collective knowledge of the existing team, ensuring a smooth transition even when members move on. This continuity is crucial for the long-term health of the project.
+- **Reduces Burnout**: Clear onboarding processes can help prevent maintainer burnout. They prevent new maintainers from feeling overwhelmed and reduce the need for constant hand-holding from existing members, leading to a more fulfilling and sustainable experience.
+
+## Documenting the Journey: From Pain Points to Guidelines
+
+Every project is different, and understanding the challenges in your project will help you create tailored guidelines.
+
+You can start by acknowledging the pain points you've experienced or witnessed within the project. Here are some examples:
+
+- When should we close a PR?
+- What method should we use to merge PRs?
+- If changes in a PR are requested and the contributor has resolved them, can we dismiss the review and merge it without waiting for approval from the person who requested the changes?
+- How long do we keep stale PRs open before closing them?
+- What criteria do we use to reject an issue?
+- May a contributor take multiple issues at the same time? If so, how many?
+- How do we handle code reviews and merge conflicts?
+- What are the communication protocols within the team and with contributors? Are there any preferred communication channels, response times, and expectations for tone and language?
+
+And the list can go on.
+
+Once you have a list of your pain points, discuss them openly with the team. Ask them questions such as what their current pain points are. What processes are working well, and what needs improvement? Brainstorm solutions collaboratively and translate them into actionable guidelines.
+
+By asking these questions and documenting the answers, you can start drafting clear guidelines that address the specific needs of your project and maintainer team.
+
+## Beyond Onboarding: A Graceful Offboarding Process
+
+While onboarding is crucial, it's also important to consider the offboarding process for maintainers. This ensures that the transition is smooth and respectful for all involved when a maintainer needs to move on and leave the team.
+
+You can consider the following when drafting your offboarding process:
+
+- **Circumstances for letting a maintainer go**: Define the criteria for removing a maintainer from the team, such as prolonged inactivity, lack of engagement, or failure to meet the project's code of conduct.
+- **Inactivity notice**: Set a timeframe for inactivity before reaching out to gently remind them of their commitment. If inactivity persists, further action can be taken.
+- **Retirement process**: What happens when a maintainer decides to step down? You might need a procedure for revoking access and ensuring a secure handover of responsibilities.
+
+## Collaboration is Key: Building Consensus with the Team
+
+Once you've drafted the guidelines, it's time to seek final input from the team. Share your work, solicit feedback, and discuss potential revisions.
+
+This collaborative approach provides valuable insights from diverse perspectives and ensures everyone feels invested in the process and is on the same page. Open discussions can further strengthen the guidelines and promote a culture of transparency within the project.
+
+It's important to remember that these guidelines are living documents. They should evolve as the project grows and adapts to changing circumstances. You need to regularly review and update them to ensure they remain relevant and helpful.
+
+## Final Words
+
+Investing time crafting clear onboarding documentation for maintainers is more than just good practice; it's a strategic move that strengthens your entire project.
+
+By creating a comprehensive onboarding process for maintainers, you are not just welcoming new team members but setting them up for success. New maintainers are welcomed with a clear roadmap, existing maintainers benefit from a standardized workflow, and the project flourishes with a knowledgeable and empowered team.
+
+So, let's give our maintainers the same warm welcome and clear direction that we offer our contributors!