The burden of open source (Interview)
Show notes
James Long joined the show to talk about his recent post, “Why I’m Frequently Absent from Open Source”. He shared several points in his blog post that struck a chord with us, so we invited him on the show to talk through the gritty details and peel back the layers of open source — the people involved, sustainability, the responsibility, the guilt, and the balance it takes to keep it all together. Join the discussion Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Rollbar – Put errors in their place! npm install --save rollbar for error tracking in your Node.js apps. Toptal – Scale your team and hire from the top 3% of developers and designers with Toptal. Email adam@changelog.com for a personal introduction. Compose – Production ready, cloud hosted databases. Pick your flavor - MongoDB, Elasticsearch, RethinkDB, Redis, Postgres, etcd, or RabbitMQ. When you’re ready to sign up use our special URL compose.com/changelog to get 30-days free on Compose Featuring: James Long – Website, GitHub, X Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Show Notes: James recently left Mozilla and shortly after he launched an open source project called Prettier - an opinionated JavaScript formatter. It was a great success. Needless to say, James experienced that overwhelming feeling many indie open source developers feel when faced with all the work required to maintain a successful open source project — the issues, feature requests, PRs, extra time required, and all the communication can really be a burden, especially when you have a full-time contracting gig and a family. His blog post was a response to this feeling as well as a love letter to his wife. Why I’m Frequently Absent From Open Source Prettier gamedev.net Scheme James’ advice for getting away from your monitor is to make pizza. If you plan to take his advice, he recommends that you check out The Pizza Book by Aaron Quint and Michael R. Bernstein. BONUS LINK (from James) — Watch Hammock Driven Development by Rich Hickey Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Guests
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