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**Nadia Eghbal:** Thanks for coming on, Ryan. |
**Ryan Bigg:** Thank you! |
• Christopher Hiller became a maintainer of Mocha in 2014 after TJ, the previous maintainer, passed control over to him without guidance. |
• The project had a large number of open bugs and features that needed to be added, but initially, the biggest challenge was not technical but rather community-related. |
• Christopher realized he couldn't do everything himself and started reaching out for help, but found it difficult to get contributors on board. |
• A significant turning point came when he spent six months working on a refactor of the core system with little progress, leading him to focus on solving the community problem. |
• He learned through experience and experimentation, without a formal mentorship or guidance, and relied on reading articles and online resources for advice. |
• Maintenance of test frameworks as a challenge due to new frameworks emerging |
• Frustration with attention being drawn away from established frameworks like Mocha |
• Importance of community and brand loyalty in maintaining project popularity |
• Difficulty in managing influx of donations and deciding how to use funds effectively |
• Funding experiments, such as Open Collective, as potential solutions for sustaining open source projects |
• Managing funds from donations and sponsorships |
• Challenges of using money to incentivize contributions |
• Perverse incentives and conflicts that arise when paying contributors |
• Difficulty in finding a sustainable way to fund Mocha development |
• Importance of having a project with internal momentum and willing contributors |
• Challenges of justifying the importance of tools like Mocha to employers or sponsors |
• Open source project growth and sustainability |
• Lessons learned from past projects (Mocha and other examples) |
• Grant funding for open source projects (Mozilla's MOSS program and JS Foundation) |
• Project scope and maintenance: when to consider a project "done" and walking away as maintainer |
• Balancing personal goals with community needs |
• Mocha's toolchain and dependencies are not fully supported on Windows |
• The current scope of Mocha includes test format convention, execution, and reporting |
• Christopher Hiller wants to see a more useful, full-on test runner with better API documentation and a clearer boundary between core functionality and external libraries |
• Burnout and frustration led Christopher Hiller to take a break from the project, but he is now contributing again due to renewed interest from others |
• The project needs dedicated maintainers and contributors to move forward; if that doesn't happen, Christopher Hiller may consider quitting or scaling back his involvement |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Tell us how you got started as a contributor, and then eventually become a maintainer of Mocha? |
**Christopher Hiller:** Well, I actually started as a maintainer. In 2014, when TJ left Mocha and all these other Node projects, he put a call out that said "Hey, I need to have somebody take over my projects. They're up for grabs." I at the time was a user of Mocha and said "Hey, I would like to help. I enjoy using th... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, TJ was sort of unique... Most of his projects really didn't have any other contributors to them. A pull request here or there, but he was really pushing the solo maintainer thing. Express did have a few other people working on it, but most of his projects were literally just him being the only ... |
**Christopher Hiller:** Yeah, Mocha had at least one other person, maybe another couple people at the periphery at the time I joined, but they still weren't that active. So yeah, that's kind of the story, I just joined up. |
I didn't really know what I was getting into. I had contributed to my own projects, I contributed some to Angular UI, which was an early kind of widget toolkit around Angular; it started pre-1.0, so I had done some open source contribution there, but I hadn't really been that involved in open source until Mocha. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It looks like a pretty crazy ramp-up, from being a user to being a maintainer. Did anything get done before contributing to other projects prepare you for what that was gonna be like? |
**Christopher Hiller:** \[03:58\] Yes and no. There are things in my career as a software engineer or what have you... I have learned, for example, how to do a code review and how to receive feedback. I don't view the code I write as an extension of myself; code is code. I wasn't really bashful about sharing it, and I ... |
But as far as dealing with -- I had never dealt with... Again, because of being a software engineer, a lot of companies will kind of insulate you from your user base directly. So if a user of the software you're building has a problem with it or whatever, they contact support and support deals with them. Maybe if the p... |
There were many issues, and I like to think that I learned fairly quickly how to not be a jerk, and be polite about pull requests and stuff. But I certainly made quite a bit of mistakes there; I didn't really know too much about semantic versioning, and that caused some problems. I remember a big one was at some point ... |
I changed the default one from one which is very sparse to one which is more verbose, and we did this in a minor, and a lot of people were really upset about that. I caught a lot of flack for changing the output, not the API, and that was kind of surprising. Since then, I've really tried to drive this home with other c... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So looking back -- it's interesting, you're talking about a lot of the biggest challenges have been kind of community-oriented stuff... When you first took over the project, did you view the biggest challenges as being technical, or being community-related? Did you see a long list of features or bugs... |
**Christopher Hiller:** When I came on we had a lot of open bugs. I looked at those bugs and I said "Oh my gosh, look at this thing; look at the terrible state Mocha is in", and so I wanted to go in and fix them, I felt like that was the highest priority. Well, you go and you start fixing bugs, and you can do that to a... |
So at the time I felt like "Well, there are all these things that need to get fixed and all these features that need to be added", but pretty quickly I realized "Well, I can't do this all myself. I need help", so I started to reach out to basically get more help. |
\[08:14\] Some people that were with the project originally maybe had learned something that I didn't at the time; they had said that Mocha is in maintenance mode. And I was like "Meh... Neah. We've got some features we can add. I think it's a good idea to add these things, because there's a lot of people that want the... |
So at the time no, I didn't think it was a community problem, but I came around and started to see "Well, I just can't do this all myself, as much as I'd like to, and I need help." That kind of started me down the path of looking for ways to keep the project sustainable. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** How long did it take you to figure that out? So you took it over in like 2014-ish... |
**Christopher Hiller:** Yeah, at some point I decided that it would be good, because there were a handful of features that were basically impossible to deliver with the current architecture. I felt like doing a refactoring of the core of the system would be a good idea, and I got some way on that. I was doing it by mys... |
I worked on that refactor for about six months and it didn't really go anywhere. Meanwhile, Mocha was just kind of languishing during that time, so it took me -- I don't know... I wanna say, I was working on the codebase for at least six months, and then this rewrite for another six months after that, and then once I k... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Do you feel like you've learned those types of challenges about being a maintainer on the fly? Was it sort of through experience and realizing when things weren't working, and sort of guessing it would happen next? Did you have any mentorship, or did you read stuff from anyone else to figure that out?... |
**Christopher Hiller:** Well, a lot of it was by the seat of my pants. Different projects demand different types of maintenance, I suppose. Mocha in particular is a project with a very large user base. The code itself is pretty touchy, so I learned to be a very cautious type of maintainer. I didn't have a mentor. I had... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[11:55\] One thing that we've touched on on this podcast before, but we haven't really explored enough is how hard it is competing for people's attention, especially contributors' attention, and I'm just recalling back to 2008 when John Resig first wrote QUnit, one of the things that he kept talking... |
Still to this day, there are just more test frameworks than maybe any other type of library, and there are more people that just decide randomly to write their own test framework, and I'm wondering if that has been a particular challenge with maintaining a test framework, where people just are too willing to go "You kn... |
**Christopher Hiller:** I've definitely experienced some disgruntled users that did not like our decisions, and "I'm gonna write my own blah-blah-blah..." |
**Mikeal Rogers:** We can say Aaron Hammer, it's okay... \[laughter\] He's a good friend, I can call him out. |
**Christopher Hiller:** Actually, I think Lab happened long before I came on, so I was not privy to that discussion. But no, that hasn't really been a thing I've been too worried/concerned about; certainly, there have been some newer frameworks that are gaining steam or have got a lot of interest... I'm not worried tha... |
What's a little bit frustrating is simply the allure of the new thing, and how "Oh, this is a new project. We need maintainers, we need contributions, it's really exciting! Hey, everybody, let's join up! Give me a bunch of GitHub stars and let's do this!" That's been a little frustrating, because I feel like there's a ... |
I would love to find a way to make a project that's already existing -- and maybe this is what I was thinking about with the rewrite, at least in part, was make it new, make it exciting. Some sort of marketing push, a new website, social media - all that stuff. Word of mouth, like "Hey, what's old is new again. Let's c... |
It wasn't until very recently, I think sometime late last year that Mocha actually crossed 10,000 stars, and there are projects that cross 10,000 stars -- this is just like the little silly popularity contest type thing, and there are projects that will cross that within a week if they get on the right website. It's ki... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[16:22\] I think in the npm rankings it's the number one depended upon, right? |
**Christopher Hiller:** Yes, and the number two is Chai, which is the assertion library that a lot of people use with it. But yeah, by a long way Mocha is used by a ton of projects on npm, and even more on just GitHub projects that aren't necessarily published. I never knew any of that before library style, of course. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... I mean, just for reference, there may only be 10,000 stars, but there are over 200,000 downloads in the last day, so it's definitely being used and depended on at a rate much higher than people are sort of saving it on GitHub. |
**Christopher Hiller:** Yeah, and I think that's kind of a criticism that I've heard before, that GitHub stars don't really have anything to do with the actual real-life popularity of a project or the maturity of a project. They're just kind of -- I don't even know what they are. It was cool when we did pass 10,000, bu... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm just thinking out loud a little bit, it's probably a known problem with not just maintaining open source projects - I think it's exacerbated there - but any kind of maintainery duty or infrastructure or anything, even outside of software, that it's really hard to keep people's attention, and I'm t... |
**Christopher Hiller:** What about instead of just a project that you consume, what if that project was also a platform and people could build upon it and make new things all the time? |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That's another way of thinking about it. I don't know if it's possible for every project to be able to do that. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think even when you get into that space -- Node is sort of in that space; there are other libraries, even smaller ones like Browserify, that you would think that at some point they can maybe be done and that everything would just be built on top of them, but it just never really happens. The world ... |
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