State of the Repo, 2018

[eshellman]

The free-programming-books repo on GitHub is truly a phenomenon. As of 2PM EST December 28, 2017, it has 98,990 stars, second most of all repos on Github (only Bootstrap has more). The repo has been forked over 25,000 times, and it has evolved through 4,559 commits. The truly amazing thing about the repo is you, the community that is still building and maintaining it. Without the 959 contributors, the 7,268 watchers and the 20,000 users per fortnight, it would be just another repo.

This year marked a significant transition, as @vhf handed over administration of the repo to the Free Ebook Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit based in New Jersey, USA. Nurturing the repo fits well with the Foundation's mission to promote the collective funding, maintenance, and distribution of freely licensed ebooks. On behalf of the Foundation, I'd like to thank Victor for his leadership, and we'll really try not to screw it up.

I've been heartened to find that free-programming-books does more than just list ebooks. It also welcomes contributors whose contributions to the repo represent their first contributions to any open-source project anywhere. Perhaps these contributors will be emboldened to help other projects, or even to start their own fantastic projects.

To remain healthy, the repo needs to continue evolving. It needs to remove contribution barriers and widen its community of editors. The periodic link-checking has been an important advance (thanks @Devinsuit and @borgified) but there are some relatively simple things that could be added.

• At least half of all contributions get tripped up by the linter, which is picky about blank spaces, list collation, pdf links and the like. These are issues that could be fixed by a bot. Automating a fix could cut administration overhead significantly and would reduce contributor frustration, improving the experience for all involved. Volunteers are needed to make this happen! We need a nit-fixing-bot #2672

• At the suggestion of @iamsubhranil, we added a github.io version of the list. This version could make the list much more accessible to beginning users, but it's had very little attention or publicity. We could do a better job developing that site.

• We could have a huge impact if we could figure out how to apply the repo's methods to other domains which require community maintenance of a dataset. So far this has not happened, mostly because users outside of programming have little familiarity with the workflow needed to edit a repo. While GitHub has down a lot to make its general UI more accessible, domain experts are frequently baffled by terminology that comes out of software engineering. (I can never remember which is HEAD and which is BASE, for example.) If anyone wants to experiment on UI, let us know. I'm also keeping my eyes on DAT.

• I have spent the last six months reviewing all the pull requests myself, which has been a great learning experience and a rather small time commitment. But the repo can only be sustainable for the long term if there is a cooperating group of people who share the review and maintenance (and hand-holding) burden. I rely on Google translate to evaluate non-english resources, which is not really an optimal way to do things. If you are interested in becoming a helper/reviewer, start by commenting on PRs as they come in. When you feel you understand what the community needs from reviewers (encouragement, for example) let me know and I'll add you to our editing team.

We have many to thank for what we've accomplished so far - every contributor and commenter; every tweeter and linker; GitHub, which has been an excellent host and partner; and Hacker News, where the repo first became widely known, may we trend again there someday.

Finally, on behalf of the free-programming-books community, I'd like to thank every author, programmer or educator who has allowed their works to be free for all to use. Your efforts will reap benefits in 2018 and in years to come, with threads of appreciation running around the world.

@eshellman for the Free Ebook Foundation (tax deductable donations accepted)

[eshellman]

Also, the repo contains 3,597 links to resources in 25 written languages.