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**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, it's a different kind of project, right? Which I guess again goes to show that open source is not all the same across all projects. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I mean, I think it's rarely that direct... It's usually pretty indirect, right? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, it is... It's not like "By the way, we're gonna fire you if you don't add these features in." It's never that direct. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I think maybe a better example is the Go project, where the majority of the committers are at Google, and Google's certainly not telling these people what to do, because they are the kind of developers that are not told what to do... But they are sort of constantly inundated with Google's probl... |
**Ryan Bigg:** That's exactly right, yes. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[47:39\] I guess part of me wonders what makes open source not something that is fun as a volunteer hobby...? That's sort of going through my head right now, but then I think "Well, some people do enjoy contributing to open source in their spare time... And I guess I was just kind of thinking about, ... |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yes, it does. it does absolutely seem coherent. So when I was starting my contributions to Spree, it was a lot of times of doing Google group answering, and a couple of issues here and there, but nothing substantial. And then working on the project itself is enjoyable, so when I was contributing to other... |
But then open source is not free as in beer, it's free as in puppy, and you have to maintain it, and people come up with weird and wonderful feature requests, and bug reports that are literally a single line of like "It didn't work." I'm like, "What didn't work?" That grinds on you, that just gets to you over (I don't ... |
And you know, your interests change over time as well. That's another issue. You get started with an open source project and you love it and you work on it every day because it's something that you're passionate about. Then if the passion kind of fades with time, you're like "Well, that's no longer interesting to me, s... |
The money helped a lot with Spree. While I wasn't in love with the code as much as I was at the start, after two and a half years, the money kept me going. I was like, "I get paid to do this; I'm just gonna keep thinking about these problems and trying to solve them, even though the code is no longer enjoyable to work ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It's almost like there has to be some reward at some point, whether it's building your reputation that's a suitable reward, or at some point then it just kind of becomes money. |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, the reputation definitely came out of that, and I still get approached at conferences, like "Oh my god, it's Ryan Bigg. Oh, it's him!" "Oh, hello." "You wrote the book, you contributed to Spree", I'm like "That was years ago... I've done a lot more now." I don't know, it's very strange having this ... |
But in the niche of a niche of a niche of a niche where we exist, in this Rails world, people are like "Oh my god, it's Ryan Bigg!" It's so weird to see that change of people who are like "Oh, I don't care about you", and other people who are like "Oh my god, it's you!" |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It's kind of the best of both world, right? Because then you can go to something else outside of open source and no one knows your name. |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, that's right; lots of anonymity there. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It reminds me of like actual celebrities that are on a sitcom, and then they move past that sitcom and do like major independent films, and everybody's like calling them the name from their character 20 years ago... \[laughter\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, totally. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** You're like, "I've done more than Rails, come on!" |
**Ryan Bigg:** \[51:54\] Oh no, that's okay... Any contribution is fine; they can name anything I contributed to. I don't care if it's Rails 3 in Action or Multitenancy with Rails. Anything. It's just good to be known, and I try to get to know them as well. I just don't want to be like hero worship, but I wanna know wh... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Does any of it surprise you, that people from totally random walks of life that take interest in it? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, it does. Absolutely. I had all kinds of people - old, young; all sorts of things - approach me, and it's just... And when they come up to you and they're like "I read your book, and now..." So, that's right. I went to a Rails meetup in Sydney, and this lady called Metanya introduced herself to me a... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That's awesome. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** There's been a lot of self-reflection -- I'm just trying to think, like, is there anything else that you've learned in the last few years about managing your workload, and just sort of being better at managing your work and not burning out, and just kind of feeling happy in your daily life? What woul... |
**Ryan Bigg:** So I'm good at really thinking about how terrible I am at managing my workload, and my wife is also really good at thinking about how terrible I am at managing my workload; not only that she's good at telling me how terrible I am at managing my workload, and... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Your advice is to get married? \[laughter\] |
**Ryan Bigg:** My advice is not necessarily to get married, to have somebody like a close friend for instance - even that; you don't have to go the whole way of getting married, but somebody who can say "You're being a ridiculous idiot. Stop working so hard. How can I help you? How can we stop this burnout? You're grum... |
For a new developer - two years from now, I hope that he would know better practices of maintaining workload. If I was able to speak to Ryan from two years ago, I would say it's not that critical that you continue doing all this work. None of it matters that much that you have to kill yourself to do it, that you have t... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It's a good advice for open source communities too, right? Even reinforcing that to each other, and not expecting that the other person is always gonna be there all the time. |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I have a similar story to this, except I've been with my wife for like 12 years now. She would be like "You're being ridiculous now", but now I can actually recognize it before she needs to tell me. This is exactly what happens, actually - there's certain things that she's just never gonna do a... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[56:28\] That's a good degree of self-reflection there. \[laughter\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It's taken a long time to get there, but yeah. |
**Ryan Bigg:** I realized that when I come home grumpy it's probably not a good thing -- if it's a single day, like, everyone has bad days. People ask me like "When does programming become easy?" It doesn't. You just have more easier days than you have hard days. You still have those hard days. And when you have those ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Hypothetically, is there anything in open source that would need to change or that could change that would make you come back and start contributing more regularly? |
**Ryan Bigg:** You could pay me to do it. You could pay me what I get paid to work full-time on proprietary software to work on open source software, just like I did on Spree. That definitely helps a lot. To come back to open source projects -- I just simply don't have time anymore. I've got my wife, I've got my daught... |
When I do have free time is on the train to work - it's half an hour in and half an hour out. I spend that time writing usually, so there's really no time for open source. |
If you gave me a full-time job where my purview was literally "contribute to open source however you see fit" and you paid me a livable wage, by all means, I'm open to job offers. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Good answer. When I've seen you advocate for people getting paid to work on open source, do you think that just has to come from companies, versus raising money for yourself, or whatever? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, I'm a hard left-wing kind of guy and socialism is high on my agenda, and it's not high on people who have the money, it's high on people who don't have the money. With regards to that, while I would love if Culture Amp would hire me purely just to contribute to open source projects that they use, o... |
\[59:55\] It's not like we have a day where it's like "Go and work on open source, it's fine...", because it doesn't make sense financially for the company to do that; you're wasting the company's -- that's why they say it's wasting the company's time contributing to these open source projects. But the way I personally... |
For instance, let's say Spree, which uses the Active Merchant gem extensively - if that was maintained by one person... It's maintained by Shopify, but if that was maintained by one person, and that one person decided to quit, and that project then fell into disrepair, Spree would have to pick up the maintenance of Act... |
With a project that isn't directly important to a business, the business doesn't see any value in contributing to that open source project. Culture Amp doesn't see any value in, well, I'm speaking for another organization. My view of Culture Amp, my experience of Culture Amp is that there isn't a view of "We should con... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** So wait, are you advocating for only in a situation when a company directly benefits should they encourage those contributions? Do you think that's right, or do you think it should be different? I can't tell which side you are. |
**Ryan Bigg:** I'm sorry, yes, I did speak for a while... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It's good, you spoke both sides really well. |
**Ryan Bigg:** Thank you. It's like that quote from Lord Of The Rings, if you're gonna ask the elves, they're gonna say "Yes and no." I'm on the side personally of companies should probably allocate at least one, two, three developers to work on open source, and not necessarily full-time, but perhaps a day every two we... |
I think because these open source projects are vital to the work that the companies are doing - it's like you report, the roads and bridges, right? It's the underlying infrastructure to these businesses; if these open source projects didn't exist, these businesses would struggle. If Rails didn't exist, Culture Amp woul... |
\[01:03:14.11\] These are vital parts of the infrastructure, and we do need to spend company's money - and we do need to spend time convincing the people with the money at the companies to contribute developer time to these projects, because they are our infrastructure and it is vital that they are maintained. So that'... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Awesome. Well, I can't think of a better note to end on. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, me neither. |
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