In a new post to his site Tomas Votruba has shared a list of five things that he, as an open source package maintainer, had heard before getting started.

I wasn't always confident while making public every single line of PHP code I write. I had to take many blind paths, spend a night full of stress coding in unknown waters and make a lot of over-complicated code that backfired to me months later.

They say "experience cannot be passed and it must be experienced" and I agree with that, but still there are some shortcuts that would speed-up my path to joyful open-source coding I have today. Here are 5 of them.

He then shares his suggestions, each with a brief summary explaining what it means and how you can apply it:

1. Be Open to Change any Package
2. Don't Keep Every feature You Have
3. Lock to LTS, Maintained Dependencies and green PHP
4. All You Need to Maintain is 1 Repository
5. Don't Take Advise as Granted, Experiment for Yourself

He includes some of his own backstory in several of the posts about his own development work and how he found out some of these "the hard way".