Waiting for Blue Robot

How To Make an Open-Source Community-Driven Project, Manage It and To Remain a Human

Written by Andrii Doroshenko (Xrayez), co-author of Godot Engine.

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Description

Software engineering can be tough, no doubt. Managing an open-source, community-led project presents its own set of challenges. The good news? We don’t have to act like robots!

Delve into effective strategies for enhancing collaboration among people striving for a shared objective. Reveal the detrimental impact of poor communication regarding your project’s vision, mission, goals, non-goals, purpose, direction, intention, principles, ideology, philosophy, etc. By neglecting these crucial elements, the long-term success of your project may be compromised.

It’s no longer surprising that one of the most notable open-source projects where these ideas are overlooked and disregarded already exists – it’s called Godot Engine. This book serves as a post-mortem analysis of Godot as an allegedly community-driven project, focusing on its fanatical nature.

TL;DR

The following satirical piece serves as the ultimate guide to all things Godot.

For more satire, read Interlude: Becoming a Blue Robot.

💡 Democracy thrives in the light. Share your testimonies and join the public discussion! The archived version of the book is available as a single-paged HTML for printing and reading.

About the Author

Andrii Doroshenko is a software developer specializing in game development. In 2017, he came across Godot Engine. In 2018, he earned a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts. He played a key role in the development and support of Godot, actively contributing to Godot’s development for five straight years on a voluntary basis. In 2021, he officially took on the role of a Godot Engine maintainer.

Andrii is the co-author of Godot Engine. In 2022, he ranked in the Top 20 contributors by the number of changes to Godot Engine. He has submitted over 200 pull requests and proposed dozens of popularly demanded features. He revamped the unit testing system in Godot, turning it into a fully functional feature. He has played a crucial role in improving Godot’s build system and is the brains behind the custom modules feature.

Among other notable contributions, he implemented features like boolean operations on polygons, as seen in the Geometry singleton. Many of the destructible features you come across in games made with Godot are there thanks to Andrii’s contributions to Godot.

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.