Habitie.net Dev Update #2

Welcome to the second Dev Update Post from the Habitie.net Team 🙂

Yes, I told you these posts will come every month now. And no, we couldn't keep up with that ☹️

Which leads us to the main topic of this dev update post: The struggle of keeping up the pace in a spare time project while we all have our main jobs, families, hobbies and other stuff.

We have 5 people in our team currently. Each one respective with a main job, life and appointments. We have a team meeting every two weeks where we discuss current topics and plan our sprints. Our sprints last 1 month and include a planning, issues, board, review and retrospective. We're very SCRUM inspired but don't use everything from that toolbox.

However the progress we have is very low currently due to the fact, that we can't work full time on the project and Habitie often loses the priority fight against other important things in our lives. Over the years we learned some lessons about how to keep up the progress and how to get something done on the project. We want to share those lessons with you here.

1. We keep our issues as small as possible and organize them in epics. Also we include all the important information with each issue to keep them independent and clear. That helps to quickly get into a topic and tackle it.
2. We have a well documented and working setup guide for our repositories to enable every developer to get the project up and running without struggle or time loss.
3. We have regular meetings and work in sprints to keep up the motivation and feedback cycles.
4. We posts any progress we achieve in our team slack channel. It motives to see when other people on the team get something done.
5. We encourage our team members to do small steps. You don't have to immediately finish the whole issue. Small and slow steps are good as long as they bring you in the right direction.
6. We recommend not to "drop out" from the project. When you don't do anything for 4 weeks and then come back to work on the project you don't have any idea what's going on, where you left your code, what you're doing or who you are, then you're lost and it takes some energy and time to get back into the project after this. Thus we recommend to do something everyday even if it's just starting the server and clicking around. This will help to stay in touch with the codebase and the project.
7. We understand that motivation is fugitive. So when you're inspired by something and you want to build somewhat amazing because you're burning for it, then do it! This will keep up the motivation and fun in the project. It's not about tackling one by one boring bug issue but it's about having fun and learning together.

We're planning to introduce further changes and ideas to improve the motivation of the team even more and to increase the progress on the project in the future. Thus we're searching vor new developers to get on the project and we think about publishing the code as OpenSource to get the community on board.

Do you have any experience with spare time projects? Any suggestions or ideas? Share it with us, we're happy to hear from you 🙂

Photo by Danielle MacInnes.