Open Source Best Practices

Eight phases. Do them in order. Phase 1 isn't optional.

Most of this is about being honest with people upfront. About governance so decisions aren't chaos. About not burning yourself out. About saying no kindly. About building something sustainable.

Start with Phase 1. Always.

The Complete Release Workflow

Phase 1: Security Foundation

Clean your git history. Today. Before anything else.

Look for API keys, tokens, passwords, database credentials. Check .env files with real values. Look for AWS keys, Firebase secrets, anything internal. Private URLs, internal hostnames, IP addresses. Employee emails, customer data, anything personal. Large binaries and build artifacts.

Use Git History Cleaner to remove secrets and rewrite history so the data is truly gone.