Alright, this one is a bit of nostalgia and a bit of a brag.

When Sublime Text came out, I jumped on it because, well, I wanted TextMate and I didn’t have a mac, and I wanted something with the power and programmability of emacs, but emacs lisp is wonky and kinda evil and too different from Scheme to be enjoyable. Sublime Text was native windows, and python-powered, and python is a great choice for short, readable scripts.

Sublime Text was very young when I first found it. It shipped with python scripts to do certain basic operations, like re-flowing text, but the only person ever to write one was Jon Skinner, the developer of Sublime Text. Early on, I wrote a feature request asking for plugins and Jon was keen and supportive.

What was surprising to me was how quickly things can explode if you’re willing to just ask for them and fiddle on some basic code. I wrote the feature request for plugins on 20 Mar 2008. Jon lent a hand almost immediately. Within 11 days, I had;

• published the first real plugin (it made a backup every time you saved a file, to give you a free historical trace)
• bought a domain and installed wiki software to let people document the app
• created a public source code repo to collate everyone’s code
• set up build software to package things
• written a plugin which downloaded other plugins

This helped turned some enthusiastic developers and their distributed code into a proper community. The package repository eventually ended up with 40 packages, and the documentation became pretty good. These have both been superceded, but that’s good — I think what I established was more of a cheap prototype, and other people have gone on from that, but I’m happy to have taken the first steps on several fronts.

So, I took a few, disparate lessons from this;

– Almost everything is free. I got wiki software, source control, libraries, and such, for nothing. I suppose we all know that there’s lots of free stuff on the net, but even though it’s so easy to grab it and combine it, and because it comes in bits, I sometimes forget that you can get a proper thing – running, deployed software available at a real domain – by just asking for it. And this was 2008. It’s even better now than it was then. If you have an MSDN account and aren’t using your Azure credits, you need to!

– Allow Minute Programs. A python plugin can be three lines long. It makes it easy to dip your toe. If you can develop something good before having to establish ‘big-software’ features like namespacing, package definitions, etc, people will develop more of them.

– People improve on first versions. I think people are great at commenting on, improving, and altering existing content. By establishing an initial version – even a rubbish one – you give people something to alter. A buggy plugin, a wiki with two short pages – people will correct bad things more quickly than establish new things. Everything I did has been superceded, which is great, because it’s all miles better than I did. Whatever pearls that now exist, I am quite happy to have been some of the grit in the oyster.

– Work in public: There was something about asking questions, developing, then showing the results creates a feedback loop. People like what you’re doing, you feel good, you share, they get better, they feel good, and so on. Nice. Probably most of my open source projects probably come out that sense of saying ‘see what I did!’ that feels good.

– Small-project devs work hard for strangers who write good feature requests. I’ve found this over and over. You communicate your need clearly, and a possible approach or solution, and you give the developer a route to go down, a kind of ‘permission’ or justification. Tom Kerrigan, the developer of t-chess, is another great example of someone who works closely with his customers.