The burden of open source (Interview)

The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

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.

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Featuring:

• James Long – Twitter, GitHub, Website
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website

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.

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• 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.

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BONUS LINK (from James) — Watch Hammock Driven Development by Rich Hickey

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!