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In that process, I just started contributing a lot of actually what was in the WordPress.com codebase back to the WP-CLI project. It was a great experience, and from there I eventually became the maintainer when the existing maintainer stepped down. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** What was that process like? Did the existing maintainer just kind of give up, or not have enough time, or were you just doing so much more that they decided to kind of hand it off to you? |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** We are already gonna enter the rabbit hole of WordPress, and WordPress is an open source project... So this guy's name is Scribu - a very good developer, strong developer. I really enjoyed contributing to WP-CLI's project because every time I submitted a pull request, he would just tear me to shre... |
\[04:24\] Scribu is a great, great developer. He was also very active in the WordPress project as a committer, and eventually just kind of threw his hands -- I mean, he's obviously the better person to ask as to why he left the WordPress community, but he made the decision to leave the WordPress community, and as such,... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** So there was no official hand-off, or anything... |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** He wrote a blog post. Scribu was known for being the maintainer, and then he's like "Daniel is the new maintainer. Daniel has decision-making authority on everything, Daniel is responsible for tagging new releases..." On my end, it's like "I've gotta figure out how the releases are made in the fir... |
This was 2013... So February 2013 I got fired, and then a month later I lined up my dream job, so that's beginning March 2013, and then my daughter was born, my first child was born end of March, and then in the middle of my unofficial week-long paternity leave I was laid off. So it's like, getting fired and then getti... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It sounds insanely stressful. |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** You know, everyone kind of has I feel like emotional attachment to open source as a big component to everyone's relationships to open source projects, and at the time, for all the other turmoil in my life, I had a strong, positive emotional attachment to WP-CLI, so it was like, "Of course I wanna ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, you see that a lot... The people that you work with, those relationships tend to last a little bit shorter than the friends that you meet in the community, and a lot of the attachments that come along with the work that you do in the community. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Can we talk a little bit about that? Just because I was looking at your [GitHub contributions](https://github.com/danielbachhuber) -- I mean, you're incredibly active, like orders of magnitude active than most other people on GitHub... But at least just in my interactions with you, I rarely hear you s... |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** Oh, sure! I mean, why else would you do it? \[laughter\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, I guess so, yeah! I mean, how do you keep such a positive attitude about all the work that you're doing? Is it just that you just set really good boundaries about the work that you do, or do you just love it that much and you're that crazy? |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** \[07:57\] I think it's both. I think setting boundaries is integral, and if I could help anyone else involved in open source in any way, it'd be like coaching and education around setting boundaries. That is a whole two hours of conversation in itself. But I actually like to thank GitHub, for all ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Um, probably 2009... |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** Yeah, a long time ago. Right now, if I wanna fix something in WordPress, I have to create a patch - using Git, thankfully - and upload it to Trac, and then hope that someone wants to commit my patch, or provide feedback, or even comment on it in the first place. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Has that, in your experience, changed how WordPress gets new contributors, versus something like WP-CLI getting contributors, because it's on GitHub? Is it just a lot harder? |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** Yeah... And that is a very multi-faceted topic, like "How to get new contributors? What is the right number of contributors for a project?" I think the developer experience of contributing is kind of tantamount to developers contributing to the project, but the thing to note about the WordPress pr... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[laughter\] Yeah, that's good for me. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I wanna come back to this point where, you know, it sounds like you're out of the job, so you've gotta figure out your personal sustainability, with a new baby, and you're also dealing with taking on this new project, which I imagine also has some sustainability challenges. Did you consider those kin... |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** I think at that time I -- so, the business I do right now and the business I've done for a while is just consulting; companies hire me to do different stuff. I have a few monthly ongoing retainers with long-time clients, and then on occasion I pick up a kind of a fixed "Go build this" sort of thin... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[12:26\] Did it just sort of like creep up on you? Was there something that caused it? |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** I think that for a lot of developers you're constantly seeking out new challenges, and that's part of the motivation behind what you do. So as soon as something becomes easy to do, or you're not really getting that thrill of learning something new out of it, then it just kind of becomes work. So I... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, I mean, obviously a lot of people come in and leave, right? And we do optimize for people that casually kind of float in and out, so we don't rely on everybody sticking around. I think for the people that do stick around, it's just a matter of having a clear set of work for them to take on and ... |
I will say that on kind of the burnout end, or the "I have too much work" end - and you can tell me if this lines up with your experience, but what I see a lot is that somebody will carve out responsibility for themselves, and they'll take responsibility for it, and they'll take on a task or a set of responsibilities t... |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** I've seen it in my own experience, and I know that it's true just based off common sense. I think the other aspect of it too is people are typically ambitious with the amount of time that they have to commit to a project, and how quickly they will be able to accomplish what they have committed to.... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, definitely. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I think that what you were saying was sort of touching more on the incentives or like the intrinsic motivations for someone to keep pushing through whatever, no matter what the task is, and I guess I'm hearing from you, Mikeal, more about the size of the task or the actual work in front of you becomes... |
\[16:17\] But I think if you're sufficiently intrinsically motivated, it shouldn't matter what the size of the task is, or you would find help to push through it, so... I guess I'd push back on it a little, I don't know. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, I think also to Daniel's point, a lot of the intrinsic motivation is learning something new. And when people are early contributors and they're doing early reviews, on the outside that might seem like really menial work, but they actually are learning something by doing that. By teaching it to ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I was thinking that the incentives sort of change over time maybe to -- I don't know if this is some of your experience, but maybe you join because you're learning all these great new things, and there are all these new tasks... And then there are other incentives to keep you in, like the leadership a... |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** So from your two's perspective, I'm really curious about the distribution of involvement types across an open source ecosystem, in the sense that there are a few different stereotypes that are easy to point to... One is the late-night hobby hacker. They've got a 9-to-5 that keeps them occupied, po... |
Then there's the kind of commercial open source contributor, in the sense that they have a 9-to-5 job that's directly related to the open source project that they're contributing to, and it's a justifiable use of their work time to contribute and be involved in the project. What do you think is the distribution breakdo... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think there are, but it is really project-dependent, I think. For instance, what I see in projects that are focused on developers, or their users are developers - they get a lot more users, just like people that use it every day have an itch to scratch. Whereas something like WordPress, which is in... |
**Break:** \[20:01\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Daniel, one of the reasons that I wanted to have you on here was because you've done a lot of interesting public experiments around both getting new contributors and new maintainers, and getting paid directly for your work, and in some cases those things even overlap... So I wanted to just kind of sta... |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** That is a really hard question to answer, because I don't even have an answer to this. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Well, so there are a couple things - we could just start to talk about the [Kickstarter campaign](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/danielbachhuber/a-more-restful-wp-cli), for example, which seemed like a really successful campaign that you did last year. I remember you said that you were gonna wor... |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** Right. So back to the beginning -- and part of what's relevant is that I am self-employed, and I do all of my time-tracking, and measure how much I'm earning in terms of billable hours. So for me, participation on stuff that isn't global hours has to be justifiable in some way, or kept in check; o... |
So I think that kind of ties into the economic equation, because the economics of open source involvement, on one end, it's companies sponsoring employee time on a project; Facebook is doing this with React, and there's plenty of examples in the ecosystem for that. And that's justifiable from a company perspective, and... |
The Kickstarter came about when I left the full-time job. It's like, I've been doing this WP-CLI thing on the side, I'd love to get paid to be able to spend more time on it, and how am I gonna get people to pay me to work on open source? Well, maybe I'll do a Kickstarter. And under the encouragement of half a dozen peo... |
\[24:10\] I think one of the things about a Kickstarter campaign - actually, I wrote a blog post with all these conclusions that I came to, that I think can serve as a reference point for other people... But in order to sell a Kickstarter, you have to be selling something sexy, and often that's new feature development.... |
The second half actually went towards a lot of my involvement towards the WordPress REST API project, which was a new feature that was finally committed in total to WordPress core last December. |
So I thought it was an interesting experience and I learned a lot. I don't know that it leads towards sustainability for our project, because it's hard to be repeatable; you're selling a feature that you're building, so for better or for worse people have to like the idea of that feature. So there's a certain amount of... |
So it was a fun experiment... Maybe I'll do it again. The way that I think about Kickstarter projects right now is that they're kind of like debt financing, where your collateral is your reputation within the community. If you wanna raise 40k on your reputation within a community, or 50k, or whatever amount, you're fre... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** There's a couple different ways to do crowdfunding, right? There's Patreon, where it's more recurring, and it's just sort of like directed at you. Obviously, Kickstarter really does has to be about a feature, because it's one big push... Is there something that you kind of prefer about that approach ... |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** That's a good transition to what's going on right now, and I think it brings up a good point. I wanna cover the point first, which is of that Kickstarter campaign, the large dollar amount contributions represented easily the majority of the total amount. So if you wanna do a Kickstarter campaign, ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** And how did you get those? |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** People I know? I don't know. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Got it. |
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