Understanding your users should be an important step of software development. In recent years, many end-user facing FLOSS communities integrated at least some aspects of design into their development. Unfortunately, most developer-centric projects still haven't started to even think about it.

This talk concludes two years of user research in Forgejo, a Git-backed software forge and collaboration platform. Forgejo can be self-hosted or used on a public instance like Codeberg.org to create software together, from sharing and reviewing code to tracking user problems, doing project management and doing design work.

Key points include:

• Surprise: False assumptions we made about our users.
• Challenge: Understanding complex and technical use cases.
• Bad-practices: Why "Feature Requests" and the common workflow to create software might actually be a terrible idea.
• Some ideas: Scaling user research beyond the team of one.