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**Nadia Eghbal:** \[08:14\] It's like a totally different function from documentation as well, right? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, totally. I'm always interested in helping out communities and building communities and helping people understand code. Documentation is one of the ways that I do that, and the community manager role was definitely another way I could do that... Because I got really involved with the spree project a... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Did you bring any kind of particular focus on non-code contributions, since that's kind of the world that you came from when you started community management? |
**Ryan Bigg:** I welcomed all kinds of contributions; we did eventually have Spree guides, so we did end up doing that, but a lot of the contributions I would say on Spree were code contributions, people improving the framework and that sort of thing. Documentation wasn't kind of our focus on that project. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Maybe this is a dumb question, but because Spree is a user-facing application, which is kind of different from the types of open source project we've had on here before, was Spree being open source - did that change how you thought about the community manager role? Was it like being a community manage... |
**Ryan Bigg:** I've never been a community manager at any other company so far; Spree is my only experience with that. What we were doing at Spree was mainly answering emails, maintaining the GitHub issues, doing new releases and that sort of thing. I don't know if it's any different to any other community manager role... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** You mentioned that you were traveling a lot and going to conferences and stuff like that - what was your schedule like? How much were you actually traveling? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Well, I think it was 2013 that I traveled six and a half times around the world, the equivalent of... So about 180,000 kilometers. That was a lot of flying. My longest flight was 42 hours I think it was, from point to point. It was crazy. |
There was this time where I was consulting in the U.K., then I flew back to Melbourne and then had to fly back to New York for a conference the week after, so I spent three or four days of that week in airports. That's the less glamorous side of going around the world and traveling and speaking at conferences. |
The glamorous side is that you get to meet all these people and they're like "Oh my god, it's Ryan Bigg! He wrote the book and he maintains Spree! He's actually real, he exists! He's been really helpful, and I love him!" That kind of fanboyism is hilarious. My wife got approached at a conference that we both attended; ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Do you think some of that contributed to the feeling of burnout in that type of a role? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yes, absolutely. It's this -- what's the word I'm looking for? Not Messiah complex... Fanboyism, hero worship probably is the better term for it. People think you're the most amazing thing and you do all this amazing work, and therefore my feelings for that were "People think I'm amazing, so I have to co... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[12:26\] Do you feel the same way about documentation as well? That sort of hero worship? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, in a different kind of way. With documentation typically the projects are a much slower burn, if that makes sense; the open source projects are -- you know, if an issue or a pull request sits there for a couple of weeks, people are like "Why is it taking so long? He doesn't love me anymore." But if... |
With the Rails guides there was never any pressure to get them done. With the books I've written, there was pressure from the publisher, but as Douglas Adams says, "I love the sound that deadlines make when the whoosh past." |
**Nadia Eghbal:** One of the reasons I was interested in having you on this show was because you've contributed in a variety of different ways to projects, which I don't know that a lot of people can say they've written code and done documentation and done community management, so you've seen sort of like the whole vie... |
**Ryan Bigg:** I don't see any point in writing code if you can't explain what it does in the form of documentation. If you're developing an open source project and you want people to use it, yes they can look at the code, but having documentation where it's like "Step one, step two, step three, step four, and now you'... |
It's a very strange dichotomy and I'm trying to crack it, but I can't convince people to write documentation. They think they suck at writing documentation, but typically they don't, they're okay. Documentation is sometimes sparse, and that's why they think that documentation sucks, because the documentation they write... |
My job then, if I'm working with somebody like that, is to encourage the documentation to be written, however they wanna write it, and then I work with them in reviewing the documentation, like "Hey, by the way, did you think about adding this in? We could explain the wording here. How about having an image describing ... |
Like Spree's payment gateway - you've got to authorize the capture, the refund, all of that; you can explain it with words, but you can also explain it with a pretty picture, which helps people understand the flow much better. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It's almost just like having those methods I guess out there... It helps people help themselves, right? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, that's right. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Just thinking about it, I feel like there's almost -- the explanation that developers don't do that kind of stuff is almost just trying to pass the buck to some mythical person who's gonna come in and write all this stuff, but there's value in just having people learning how to do at least a little bi... |
**Ryan Bigg:** \[16:02\] Yeah, try it. I mean, I didn't just instantly become good at writing documentation; I don't even think that I am good at writing documentation still. It's a practice, it's an art, it's a craft; any skill that you learn - you get good at if from practice. You learn the piano by playing the piano... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It's better than zero documentation. |
**Ryan Bigg:** Exactly. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Do you think that that changes for a big project versus smaller projects? I know you've maintained smaller projects on your own and then you've contributed to bigger ones like Rails - do you think that responsibility changes when it's a small project versus a big one? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, on a small project you probably -- if it's a really small team, it's up to the developers of that project to do that documentation, whereas on Rails it's not necessarily up to the Rails core team to do that documentation, although I wish it were, because then they would have had routing documentati... |
On the larger projects you've got people who add new features, and you probably have people who want to write the documentation, and getting them to work together is the key there. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Also, the smaller projects probably don't have anything as complicated as the asset pipeline to document, right? |
**Ryan Bigg:** No, absolutely not. I still don't understand the asset pipeline. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Coming up, Nadia and Mikeal talk with Ryan about his departure from open source. In November 2015 he wrote a post announcing his departure, so we asked why he wrote it, what were the events leading up to it and what was the response from the community. We also talk about how he stepped down and hand... |
The interesting thing is that Ryan didn't actually quit open source; he still occasionally contributes, but the big thing we figured out is if quitting was the right decision for him... And you might be surprised what his response is. Stay tuned. |
**Break:** \[18:30\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I wanna get into this whole time when you burned out for a minute. So before you burned out, before you wrote this blog post, what were your days and your weeks like? What were you doing on the daily? |
**Ryan Bigg:** On the daily I'd get up in the morning and I'd check my inbox and see what open source stuff there was; I'd reply to issues that people had left comments on overnight, and then I would go to work and do my full day of work. On the train home I would check my inbox, and then before going to bed I'd check ... |
The same thing happened at the end of my Spree term. That was a similar kind of feeling where I had all this work to do and it felt endless, and I kind of just collapsed in me. With Spree for instance, there were several days, I reckon, several months of this where I would wake up and there would be 200 new messages in... |
When I quit open source in 2015 I felt the same way. I had all this work to do, I was trying to write Multitenancy with Rail, the second edition of that, and I had my wife -- I was trying to spend time with my wife and not be feeling guilty that I'm having a good time while all these open source projects are sitting th... |
It was a really difficult time, and I just felt like something has to give; either I have to spend less time with my wife, I have to spend less time at work, or I have to spend less time on open source. The wife situation isn't going away, absolutely not; that would be terrible. Absolutely terrible if that went away. W... |
What happened after that was from November through to (I think it was) June or July 2016, I was able to complete Multitenancy with Rails, and I got a big thrill out of that when I finally did complete it. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** You mentioned that you were a community manager at Spree. A lot of people, when they go for these kings of roles, they go for them because part of that role is usually working on open source. So I think the assumption when you said community manager was that a lot of that open source work was part of... |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, there was just so much extra stuff I just couldn't get done in the regular work day. Because the work day wasn't just all about the open source issues and code and pull requests and documentation, it was about replying to users on IRC, there were long discussions there; big issue threads on GitHub ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Had you tried anything prior to straight up quitting? Like "Maybe I just need to manage my email better" or whatever, and then did you just hit a point where it was like "Nope. No, this is more than that." |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, I kept trying to manage the email, but it's hard. "This news stuff that wasn't important, bounce it to the next day" sort of thing; I was trying to ask for support from Spree (the organization), I was just asking for somebody else to help maintain the open source issues, because that was just me do... |
\[24:04\] There was interest from this company called FreeRunning Technology who is now called Stembolt, and they were doing some open source maintenance, but they weren't as interested as they are now. They actually run the fork of Spree called Solidus and they're maintaining that, because after I quit, Spree kind of ... |
So yeah, it was just hard. I did try to manage it better, I did try to get support, and I guess I just didn't reach out to enough people or the right people to get that kind of support. I felt like that was the only thing I could do, it was quit. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** What was the response like when you wrote that post? Were people understanding? Yeah, people were very understanding of the quitting open source part; more understanding than I thought they would be. I thought people would be like "But, but hold on, I've still got this issue... Can you just look at th... |
Other people in the community were actually volunteering their time to help out. I've got this guy called [Johnny Shields](https://github.com/johnnyshields) who's maintaining [by_star](https://github.com/radar/by_star/), John Hawthorn ([jhawthorn](https://github.com/jhawthorn) on GitHub) is maintaining [Paranoia](https... |
Redis - I was maintaining the Redis suite of gems But still, these projects will have a single maintainer. I wish there was a community around that was interested in maintaining these, not just people who are using it passively, but people interested in actually the ongoing support of these projects. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It's funny, this makes me think about Mikeal's post actually... When Nolan Lawson recently wrote the post about starting to feel burned out by open source and Mikeal wrote a response just being like "You need to step away in those situations, and someone will always take over" - Mikeal, I'm putting wo... |
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