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Honestly, I don't think I myself have a good enough grasp of the scale it's now at. I think it's maybe time for another survey. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[59:14\] I think on that note -- I think that's a great way to take us out, with the burgeoning, amazing user community. Hopefully we'll have you back on in a year or so, once you figure that all out, and then maybe we'll have something more to say as well. |
This has been great... This has been a really great chat. We really got into a lot of really great stuff, so thank you. |
**Evan You:** Great! |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Thanks for coming on, Evan! |
**Evan You:** Yeah, thank you for having me! I think that's it... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Go to bed! \[laughs\] |
**Evan You:** Yeah, I should go to bed... It's like almost 3 AM now. \[laughter\] Alright... |
• Ryan Bigg's background in Ruby on Rails |
• His contributions to Rails documentation, including crowdfunded project for documenting Rails 3 |
• Transition into community management role for Spree open source project |
• Experience with burnout and finding a balance between contributing to open source and maintaining one's well-being |
• Ryan Bigg discusses his experience as a community manager for Spree, including the challenges of managing a user-facing application and dealing with fanboyism. |
• The burnout he experienced in that role was partly due to the pressure to continually be "amazing" and maintain high expectations from users. |
• He notes that documentation is often seen as less important than code contributions, but emphasizes its importance for making open source projects more accessible. |
• Ryan Bigg shares his own experience of learning to write documentation and encourages others to do the same, arguing that it's a skill that can be developed with practice. |
• The conversation touches on the theme of code vs. non-code contributions, with Nadia Eghbal pointing out the false dichotomy between developers who only write code and those who only contribute in other ways. |
• Ryan Bigg discusses his own experience of contributing to projects in multiple ways (code, documentation, community management) and emphasizes the value of being able to explain technical concepts clearly. |
• Ryan Bigg discusses the importance of documentation and encourages people to try writing it, even if they don't feel good at it |
• He shares his experience with maintaining small and large open-source projects, including Rails, and notes that responsibility for documentation changes depending on project size |
• He talks about his burnout and decision to quit contributing to open source in 2015, due to feeling overwhelmed by email and community work |
• Ryan describes how he was able to focus on a specific project (Multitenancy with Rails) after quitting open-source contributions |
• He discusses his role as community manager at Spree and notes that it wasn't part of his job to do open-source work, but rather extra tasks that he couldn't fit into his regular workday |
• Difficulty in finding maintainers for open-source projects |
• Burnout and the need for stepping away from project responsibilities |
• Importance of clear communication about needs and boundaries |
• Challenges in handing off projects and finding suitable maintainers |
• Role of community involvement and guidance in open-source development |
• Balancing contribution levels to avoid burnout and maintain mental health |
• Mentoring and guidance for new open source contributors |
• Burnout in open source projects: causes, effects, and perceptions |
• Maintaining a work-life balance in open source contributions |
• Community dynamics and entitlement among open source maintainers |
• Healthy project management practices and transition procedures |
• Recognizing and discussing burnout as a normal part of contributor life cycles |
• Encouraging younger open source maintainers to seek help and pass on projects |
• Burnout among first-generation open source maintainers due to overwork |
• Paying open source developers and its impact on project direction and ethics |
• Balancing personal enjoyment with professional obligations in open source work |
• Long-term maintenance and feature requests as contributors' interests change |
• Ryan Bigg discusses his experience as a celebrity in the Rails community, where he is recognized by some people but not others |
• He shares a personal anecdote about meeting a woman at a meetup who had transitioned from being a real estate agent to a Rails developer after reading one of his books |
• The conversation turns to managing workload and avoiding burnout, with Ryan Bigg suggesting that having a supportive partner or friend can help prevent burnout |
• He advises developers not to feel obligated to work themselves to the point of exhaustion, and to prioritize their own well-being and happiness |
• The group discusses how recognizing when one is getting grumpy and taking steps to eliminate the causes of that grumpiness can be an important part of maintaining a healthy work-life balance |
• Ryan Bigg jokingly suggests that if he were paid to contribute to open source, he might return to contributing more regularly. |
• The importance of having time to contribute to open source projects |
• Companies not valuing contributions to open source projects unless they directly benefit from them |
• Allocating company resources (time and money) to contribute to open source projects as an investment in the company's future |
• The vital role that open source projects play in supporting businesses, with examples of companies using popular open source technologies such as Rails, React, and Webpack. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** On today's show Mikeal and I talk with Ryan Bigg. Ryan is known for his work on Rails documentation, including the Rails guides and Rails 4 in Action. In 2015 he announced he is quitting all open source work, as he wanted to spend his free time elsewhere. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Our focus with Ryan was burnout. We talked about his time as a community manager for Spree, writing documentation for Rails, and what lead him to quit open source. Twice. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** We also talked about his occasional contributions since then, getting paid to work in open source, and whether there's a sustainable, happy medium. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So why don't we start off by just telling me a little bit about how you got into open source and how you got into Ruby? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Sure. I was interested in Ruby on Rails from about 2007 when a friend of mine showed me the 15-minute blog by DHH, where he used Whoops a lot, and he's like "Look at all the things I'm not doing", and from that point on I was really interested in building a forum system in Rail. I started building that, ... |
Then a few years later GitHub came along and I moved the project over to GitHub and people were contributing through that. So that's really where I got my start, with my own little forum project. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** You have a background as a developer, but then you made a lot of contributions to Rails through documentation, right? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, that's right. In 2011 I ran this little Pledgy campaign; I raised $2,500 to document Rails. I think it was around that time that Rails 3 was coming out, and the router had been rewritten by Sam Stephenson, but while the code had been rewritten, the documentation hadn't. So I went through all the co... |
I've also rewritten the Getting Started guide, which is probably the one that people know the most about. My first contribution though was the Active Record Query Guide, which was previously called the Active Record Finders Guide; because it does more than finders, we renamed it to querying. The Configuring Rails Appli... |
\[03:59\] This was about after my 400th commit to Rails... So I replied to him and I said "Here's the list. Here's why I am on the contributors' list." I think he was busy that day, because he didn't end up replying back. |
Anyway, after baiting him on Twitter, I ended up writing the beginning of the Asset Pipeline Guide. That's how that came about. Then the last guide that I wrote that I can remember is the engines guide, which was actually a chapter of Rails 3 in Action and I extracted the content from that and built that into the offic... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** What was it like being a documentation contributor on Rails? Was it something that was really encouraged, was there a lot of infrastructure to support for it, or was it something that you really had to drive yourself? |
**Ryan Bigg:** There was a lot of infrastructure support for it. Xavier Noria ([fxn](https://github.com/fxn) on GitHub) started that project, I think with Pratik Naik ([lifo](https://github.com/lifo) on GitHub). They started the doc Rails project, so looking for contributors, and they were really encouraging people fro... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** So you mentioned - you kind of glossed over this, but you mentioned the first documentation project you did you crowdfunded? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, that's right. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I was curious, why did you decide to crow fund that? |
**Ryan Bigg:** I was in between freelancing jobs at the time, and I was like "Rails needs documentation and I need money, so let's combine the two and we'll start this crowdfunding project, and hopefully I'll raise enough money to survive a month", and I did. It was really nice to be able to spend an entire month worki... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** You mentioned that there was some support inside of the Rails project for people doing documentation, but you eventually kind of transitioned into more of a community manager role for an open source project with Spree, so what was that transition like and what are your thoughts on how to do community... |
**Ryan Bigg:** That transition was completely by accident. I was working for a company - you probably haven't heard of it, because it's an Australian-based company... It's called the ABC, and it's the Australian equivalent of the BBC. Everyone's heard of the BBC, no one's heard of the ABC. They are a big government-fun... |
The company I was working for at the time, ReInteractive was hired as the consultant on that project. That project persisted for eight or nine months or so, and I got involved in the Spree forums (the Google groups, I should say) and a friend of mine, Phil Arndt (who does the Refinery CMS), pointed out this post in the... |
I was like, "I get to work on open source, and I get paid not a pittance, so I can actually do things." And the other offer on the table was that I get to go around the world, speaking at conferences, and I was like "Yes, yes, yes. Absolutely. I will do this, because this is an amazing offer." So I said goodbye to my c... |
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