(The following content is transcribed from my voice, which means it is spoken. You can imagine someone talking to you face to face.)
Hello everyone, my name is Lin Lin. Just today, I added a blogger's WeChat, and he greeted me at the beginning, "Are you Lin Lin from Travellings?" It seems that I have already become infamous, haha. Um, a few months ago, I saw Xiaoyu (it's better to call him by his online name, although I'm more used to calling people by their real names) published an article on his blog titled "The Benefits of Joining the Travellings Team". Ah, after reading that article, I was deeply moved. When I invited a blogger to join another project's maintenance team before, I found a bright spot in that article, which was the "Do you like scattered soldiers?" that he forgot to censor. Just by reading that article, I also started to think: What have I gained from Travellings? What have I contributed to Travellings?
Being busy with open source projects, if you don't do programming, you may only be busy with some tedious tasks. For example, reviewing websites, handling issues, communicating with others, and so on. I currently have a Chinese blog list navigation project, which I almost have no energy to manage, and there are people managing the project itself. The way to add websites to that project was very primitive at the beginning, which was editing a JSON file on GitHub manually. At that time, adding websites was just a mechanical process of ctrl+C/V. When I moved the friendly links today, I also used this method, but I couldn't stand it after only 20 websites. Travellings also used this more primitive method to add websites before using a database. I'm really curious about how the initial 300 websites were added. Doing these things in Travellings hasn't really brought me anything substantial. Even when I set up a blog, I have to spend money to buy a domain name, buy a server, and spend time on managing the website, server, CDN, updating domain name certificates, submitting website records, and various other tedious tasks. So participating in this project has brought me more communication and exchange among members, as well as pride from being praised for the project.
This kind of magical open source project can actually be maintained by one person. I heard that the current version of the Store website is completely developed, reviewed, and maintained by one person. Travellings and the Chinese blog list navigation have gone through this stage as well, but during this stage, the project often stagnates due to the time and energy of the maintainer and other circumstances. So you see, both projects currently have a team, or as one of the technical members of the Travellings maintenance team said, a gang, to handle daily development and maintenance.
There is division of labor within the Travellings project. When I was in junior high school, I joined a server construction group. The group was just created, so it was very noisy at that time, and all kinds of people would propose their own plans. It was noisy for a whole morning and we couldn't come up with a rough plan. At this time, someone suggested categorizing the personnel responsible for construction, commands, and redstone, and then selecting group leaders from these categories. These group leaders would then give orders and discuss. This plan was unanimously agreed upon by all members of the construction group, and we quickly established order according to this plan. In a team, except for small groups of two or three people, it is generally necessary to establish such division of labor, because division of labor can improve efficiency, at least it won't result in unnecessary arguments and no results.
In the maintenance team, I am probably in charge of operations, and I may also take on a product role while being responsible for technology. I often propose requirements in the maintenance team, such as designing more redirect pages, and planning for **, and so on. At this time, the product team would respond to me with a saying, "When the requirement is not implemented by oneself, imagination will soar." So every time I propose a requirement, I would say, "This feature is very important. If you delay this requirement for Travellings, I will die." But in fact, the technology, including the technology on the Chinese blog list navigation side, tends to procrastinate. The "Statistics Chart" feature on the Chinese blog list navigation has been delayed for several months.
Sometimes we also give requirements to Xiaoyu, the designer of our maintenance team, regarding page design. Recently, I didn't participate in the discussion of the new version of the page because I was at school, but after returning home and looking at their chat records, I felt that the discussion was quite frequent. Xiaoyu made one version, and then was asked to make changes. When we discuss requirements for new redirect pages, everyone is very active, except for the front-end developer in our maintenance team. As our developer responsible for development said, "When the backend is discussing how to optimize the frontend, the whole office is filled with a happy atmosphere."
We also have friendly banter in our maintenance team. Previously, because I was slow in reviewing websites, the developer in charge reviewed all of them.
"Why did you review the websites?"
"No, I only reviewed those that were overdue for more than 30 days."
"No, you can only review those that are overdue for more than 30 days."
"I just saw that they stayed for too long, so I reviewed them."
The developer later said that he could finish it in ten minutes every week by himself. I asked him to leave this kind of thing to me, after all, I can't program and I may not be able to do much in the project.
Recently, he helped Travellings create a script that can detect whether a webpage has a Travellings link. I raised an issue in the backend repository saying that some websites were misjudged by him, but that issue was directly rejected.
Some things may change when written in text, so it's better to say them in a talk show format. Currently, I have to admit that Travellings is an open project that requires teamwork. In the future, I may share some internal discussions of the maintenance team on various platforms. It's not easy to talk about a personal project like this for a whole article like today. I hope that in the future, I can share some of the discussions within Travellings, so that everyone can understand that this is an interesting maintenance team, an interesting gang.