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**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, I wouldn't say always, but stepping away is an opportunity for other people to step up, right? |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Right. That was the thing that stuck out in my head about your post. It sounds like there's often this fear that if I step away people might be mad, or everything will disappear or fall down or whatever, but often times people are okay, and if you just say you're not doing it, then you're just not doi... |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah. I should have just asked for support. It's absolutely what should have happened. It shouldn't just come down to quitting, it should be like "Hey, by the way, I'm having a hard time here. Here's what I need help with." But it's the anxiety about it; I couldn't phrase it that way before. Of course, w... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, I think when it's that overwhelming, the right thing probably is to just say "You know what, I'm stepping away entirely." Maybe six months before that it might have been good to be like "These are the things that I need help with", but once you're in a certain point, your mental health is more ... |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah. And I do feel a lot more mentally healthy (is that a thing?), I feel happier now that I've got less responsibilities in terms of open source work. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I was wondering about that, because you still make occasional contributions, and it seems like you're still paying attention to things in open source. Was that post more just about having to draw this line in the sand and say "I'm not maintaining projects, and I can contribute when I feel like it", or... |
**Ryan Bigg:** It's true, I do continue to maintain some open source projects. I've got this open source project called Elastic which talks to ElasticSearch servers using Elixir. I actually use it at work, so when I'm working on that, I maintain it at work, and I never do any maintenance on it outside of work, because ... |
\[28:10\] And then I also have another open source project that I'm maintaining called Twist, which is my book review software, which I've been tinkering on for about six years. It's open source, but nobody else contributes to it, pretty much it's just me. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm curious just to hear more about how you handed off your projects and facilitated that process of stepping down. You said you just put out a call for volunteers and you found some maintainers; was there anything that you officially had to do on your repos? Just for other people that might be intere... |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yes. So when I quit, I left a big note in the readme saying "This project is no longer maintained. If you want to maintain it, please contact me at ryanbigg.com." I also put that in the blog post, too. I've got several emails from people who were interested in maintaining it, and I was like "Well, these ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That I wanna hear more about. I noticed you had something on -- I think it was translation-gem maybe... You were helping to triage issues, and then expressed a little bit of frustration that whoever brought it up wasn't helping out. |
**Ryan Bigg:** Oh, you saw that too... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I was just wondering, how do you know who's gonna be a "good maintainer" or committed maintainer? How do you actually pick someone to hand off to? |
**Ryan Bigg:** So there was this guy in the community who I've known since I was a pup... There was this guy called Jason King, and he has a lot of opinions, and some of them are right. This particular opinion was that the i18n gem was unmaintained and abandoned and nobody loved it, and Sven is a horrible person for do... |
I'm probably going to step away from the i18n project now that it's done and maintained in a relatively healthy state. So if anyone else wants to step up and maintain... I'm sure Sven and I can find somebody else who can do that. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Do you feel like because you sort of made a conscious decision to step in, did that make it easier to contribute where maybe others didn't? Is it just you cared more than other people? It sounds like it was an easy problem to solve, or you kind of just came in, did it and then you left. |
**Ryan Bigg:** That's a tough question. I think it needed to have two things - it needed to have somebody who cared somebody who had time; well, that person needed to have both of those things. They needed to have the care and they needed to have the time. I happened to have both at the time, because I'd finished writi... |
If anyone else feels the same way, I'm sure Sven and I could find somebody else to maintain it as well over the long haul. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Would you recommend handing -- for people that are newer to open source and looking to build their reputation, would you trust someone like that to take over a project that has been handed off, versus a project that they started themselves? Does that make sense? Is that the right kind of role? |
**Ryan Bigg:** \[32:02\] I wouldn't recommend, like, for Sven and I to hand off i18n to somebody who's new to open source. I reckon what we could do is have this handover period of probably a year where we monitor the issues and just give guidance, that kind of thing, so if people are interested in open source, they ca... |
So yeah, I think if new open source contributors wanna come in, by all means... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Do you feel like you had that mentorship for yourself as a maintainer? |
**Ryan Bigg:** In the early days no, but with practice and Spree and a lot of the community discussions around that I believe I did get a lot of mentorship there. And there was also a lot of people who kind of grate on you a little bit. There's this one guy - I'm not gonna name him, because you know, name is withheld t... |
So I get on my bike and I ride two kilometers, a mile from my house, and I have an accident. I come off my bike and break my left arm. So I'm mad from this guy, and then this car cut me off and I broke my arm and I just cracked it really hard. I pick my bike up off the road and threw it over to the curb and I just went... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[laughs\] Worth it! |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, it's that kind of thing -- in open source people can be discouraged because of the hatred and vitriol and entitlement; every open source maintainer comes across it. I know Aaron Patterson talks about it a lot on Rails, and there's other Rails contributors who talk about it a lot... That sense of en... |
One person who I think does this really ridiculously well, who always seems cheery and happy and chirpy is Jose Valim on the Elixir project. He consistently is happy, treats people with respect even if they're being a bit blunt or a bit obtuse, and he's just an inspiration absolutely. I wanna be more like Jose. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It seems like you still pick up new projects here and there... Do you think that to some extent you enjoy picking up a new project and getting involved in new projects more than the inevitable maintenance of them? Is that kind of part of why this continues to happen as well? |
**Ryan Bigg:** I'm a sucker for it. I'm such a sucker for it. With i18n I think I am not going to maintain that any longer with anything else, but the Elastic package - I'm probably going to maintain that as long as I work at Culture Amp or as long as I need it. But I try and realize that I'm slipping back into that li... |
\[35:59\] I try and catch myself doing that, and I go "No, that wasn't healthy before, and it's probably not gonna be healthy now, so let's just not do that. Let's find something else to distract our brain with", so that's what I'm doing with my writing at the moment; that's my distraction from open source, if that mak... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Have you had any projects that you picked up like that or sort of working on that then did grow the community and that you were able to just kind of step away from without people noticing? Are there any practices that you might have learned along the way? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Paranoia is probably the only project that did that. It's in accessparanoia.alternative/equivalent for active record, and then when I did quit this open source work there was a substantial community around - I guess substantial is like 20 people - it who were using it actively. One guy stepped up and tha... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** So sort of wrapping up this segment - so people use the term burnout a lot to talk about when they leave or step down or whatever... Do you think that people need to call it burnout in order to leave? Is it okay just to leave because you're kind of done with something and you wanna focus on something ... |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, burnout is used as this convenient excuse; it's like "My mental health is being affected by this project and now I feel like leaving. I'm going to leave now." I think while that is mostly true, in some cases it may not be true; it may just be used as a convenient excuse. |
Also, the reason I didn't quit or hand over the projects earlier is because I had the anxiety around "If I quit, then people will hate me, they'll not use the project and this will have all been a waste of time. It will all just crumble into dust", and that's not true at all. That didn't happen. People continually use ... |
I think what we need to have is more of a discussion in the open source community like "If you are no longer interested in the project, if your heart is no longer interested, just like a regular job, you're allowed to leave. You're not chained to your desk, you're not forced into the building every single day." You can... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That's what made me start thinking about it, because it is like with a job, where... I imagine for people - if you're really passionate about your job and you might be afraid to leave because you're like "Well, who's gonna everything that I was doing?" or "The next person may not be as good" or whatev... |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, absolutely. I agree. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Something that Adam was musing about that I also wanted to ask you about is do you think that we're hearing more about burnout now, just because open source as a practice or community has started to mature, and there's sort of this question now if it's not just about creating stuff in open source, but... |
**Ryan Bigg:** \[39:51\] I think that's definitely the case. I think what we're seeing is the first generation of open source contributors - or at least on GitHub projects... I mean, I'm only new to this game; open source has been around longer than I've been alive. I think we're seeing these first-generation open sour... |
So what we should be encouraging is the second generation or next generation of open source maintainers to come along. Encourage the first generation to say "By the way, I'm looking for help", exactly like what I should have done. "I need help with these projects. I'm trying to maintain them, but I'm struggling." It's ... |
So when they do that admission, then they should look around the community, like "Who's been contributing to this project? Who can I tap on the shoulder to be the next maintainer or the next group of maintainers for this project?" That's probably why we're hearing more about burnout, because that first generation is ge... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Coming up we talk with Ryan about getting paid for open source work and whether or not money actually helps. We talk about his thoughts on compensating open source developers, funding an individual contributor versus funding a project, a happy path to maintainership if there is one, and so much more... |
**Break:** \[41:25\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I wanted to touch on what it's like to get paid for open source and how money and open source mix. When you were at Spree, you were being paid to work on open source, and it sounds like even some of your open source work now is on work hours. Do you think that the presence of money helps keep you in o... |
**Ryan Bigg:** Certainly. It absolutely does. If for instance I was not paid to work on Spree, I probably wouldn't have done as much work as I did. It allowed me to live my life, have my roof over my head, have food on my table sort of thing, for two and a half years. Within that two and a half years I did a substantia... |
With regards to culture and paying me to do open source contributions, they benefit indirectly from that because we're using the Elastic package at work, and if that Elastic package didn't exist, then we would probably use another package or somebody else would have to contribute to another open source project to do th... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Are there tradeoffs to it? Are there things where being paid to work on open source makes things harder, or just compromises you in some way? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, your ethics are kind of compromised in the way that "We're paying you to do open source, so these are the things we think are important and these are the things you should work on." At Spree, because I was paid to do Spree work, you've got this large group of work that you can do, and there's a lar... |
If I was paid to work on a particular open source project -- let's say I worked at Facebook and worked on the Babel project for instance, even though I'm not a JavaScript developer; a large open source project like that, used by thousands of people, because I'm paid by Facebook, Facebook gets their say of what I contri... |
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