Description
Sometimes we set out to create a project with clearly defined scope, with the best of intentions for maintainability, usability, and clarity. Then, if we’re lucky, users show up and want to do something else. It starts small - a feature here, an edge case there. How do we navigate ‘scope creep’ in open source projects and the tension between what we set out to build, what we can competently maintain, and what users actually want? Told through the history of JupyterHub, a project for hosting Jupyter notebook servers targeted explicitly at small single-machine groups, which is now used routinely to serve thousands of students and researchers; something which was explicitly and deliberately out of scope for the project from day 1. But users want what they want.