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I think the one dynamic that will get interesting if we focus on funding people versus projects will be "What happens if someone does walk away?" and because it's open source, they can sort of -- you know, we see this in a lot of projects now where the original author might not be the person maintaining it actively, bu... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I mean, you can always stop funding it, right? You can discontinue... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Right, in theory, but if people don't know about it... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** If that original author or maintainer is not transparent about how much work they're actually doing, then... Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, I see. Makes sense. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I feel like in general a topic that I'd like to see a lot more conference talks about and a lot more discussion about is how to leave, how to walk away from something responsibly. It's actually better for the project for you to be less involved, most of the time; the more you kind of hover around, th... |
\[32:09\] It's actually better just to have a cleaner break a lot of the time, but people feel this kind of nagging responsibility to hover around, and things like that. I've been getting this a lot over the last seven or eight months. Since leaving the Foundation, people are like "Oh, are you going to the Foundation c... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's funny. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** No, like, why am I gonna be there and just like -- just being there sort of undermines the people trying to take on the work that I was doing, right? It gives a channel for everybody who's dissatisfied with any decision to just go like "Well, I'm gonna go talk to Mikeal and do what he thinks." Nobody... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I agree, we don't see enough conversation on that stuff. Andrey Petrov, who maintained a project called Urllib3, has done several transitions and he recently published a blog post about this, and I was like "Wow, I never see content about how to strategically practical tips on how to hand off a projec... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, at some point the end happens - this show, for one, and then projects, people's term. The term is serviced, so to speak. If you're involved in something, I don't think you should have to commit for life; you can commit for a term - one year, six months, two years, or whatever makes sense for y... |
**Jerod Santo:** I was thinking about that sense of dread that Nadia was mentioning with maintainers, and the closing of the issue, and then the analog to the podcaster and the ending of a show, you know? "What will people think when this show...?" You know, that's why so many of them fade out slowly, quietly into the ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's too difficult to actually end it. |
**Jerod Santo:** To actually end it well, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, let's Seinfeld this. People ask us "How did this show do?" I think this show was really successful. I think this show did really well for not being in our main feed; it brought its own audience, and over time it did really well. I think that's kind of how we're ending it. I also say that we're... |
So you can go to changelog.com/podcast to pick that up, or just search in any podcast app for the Changelog and you'll find it. We have this conversation on that show, too; that's where this original conversation with Nadia happened. This was a focused channel for exploring different perspectives in open source sustain... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** We should plug the Sustain OSS conference. The Open Collective folks put that on together, and the last one was one of the best events that I've been to in terms of -- I mean, it was like an 8-hour version of RFC, with a lot of people in the room that you would wanna have as guests... It was a really... |
\[36:01\] My worry with it was always that it was gonna be too prescriptive, but it really wasn't. It was about everybody talking about the things that had worked for them and why. That's a way to learn and to create a lot of new leaders in open source. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, definitely Sustain OSS. GitHub also does an event series called Maintainerati, which is maintainers getting together to talk about their shared challenges and things that they're facing... So that's another good channel if you're a maintainer. |
**Jerod Santo:** Also Nadia's Medium highlights is another place that this is conversation continues... \[laughter\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** ...plus some weird stuff thrown in there, but yeah. \[laughter\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And I guess me and Nadia might come back on the Changelog to interview people from time to time, so... There's a couple people that we didn't get to that I would like to have on. If we don't at some point interview Sean Larkin I think I'll be upset. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Well, he got interviewed on the Changelog, right? |
**Jerod Santo:** Right, but that was a couple years ago now, and he's definitely -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Things have changed. |
**Jerod Santo:** We did talk about -- I think they had just launched Open Collective and it was getting steam, but it's the kind of... I mean, Webpack is a stand-out project in many ways, and different than other projects in many ways as well, and perhaps exemplary in certain ways, and in my opinion in certain ways it ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** We don't just do-- we have several guests back several times. I think Mike Perham was the first fourth time guest... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yup. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...but we've had guests back, and it's great. We'll talk to them a year later, we'll catch back up, we'll see them on the next release or the next major release, or something that's pinnacle and the projects change, whether it's new maintainers or a new direction, or a conference finally, or somethi... |
This Friday we're gonna release a show with David Heinemeier Hansson on Stimulus, and we've talked to him before about 10+ years of Rails, but that doesn't mean we couldn't have him back on. The second time around I know I was a bit more comfortable, because I felt like David's a buddy now, versus like "Oh, DHH..." Any... |
Let's end by saying thanks... I mean, I know personally -- I've personally benefitted from knowing both of you, and then playing the behind-the-scenes role I personally have in this show's creating and execution and production, so it's been a lot of fun to coordinate things with you all, but at the same time take a bac... |
\[39:11\] I learned a lot of stuff from both of you, but all that to say thank you so much for working with us and caring about the community so much to put your time and effort into it, and then obviously to come back on as a finale to give a nice ending to a show like this, so thank you very much. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Thanks. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I feel really grateful also, so thanks to all of you. Having a space to talk things out - I feel like from the first conversation with Mikeal we just really hit it off and had just enough shared and different views that just having a dedicated time and space to talk about this stuff just helped us go ... |
I think I told you guys this - I think Changelog was the first podcast interview I ever did. I also never listened to podcasts ever, and now coming out of RFC, not only did I actually listen to a couple RFC episodes myself, but I'm actually really into podcasts... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yay...! |
**Nadia Eghbal:** So the experience of even like recording a podcast was just a really great meta experience of being like "Wow, this is a really great format for hearing people's stories, exploring with someone else..." Yeah, you've totally converted me to podcasts, which is pretty great. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's awesome. Anything from you, Jerod? |
**Jerod Santo:** I will just echo whatever you're saying, so I will say no, nothing for me; thanks for everybody, this was an awesome show, and I'm looking forward to these kinds of conversations continuing on the Changelog. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. This is not the end, this is just the beginning of something else. To the listeners out there who have listened to this from the beginning, thank you so much for your kind thoughts. Your time and your attention mean the world to us, so we really thank you for that, and... Go maintainers! Thank... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Henry, you said that you've become an accidental maintainer of Babel... How did you start contributing to Babel and then eventually become a maintainer? |
**Henry Zhu:** So I started contributing to Babel through another project that I was maintaining. It was called [JSCS](http://jscs.info/), it's a JavaScript linter. Through that project, I learned about what are called AST's (Abstract Syntax Trees) and I realized by working on a tool that dealt with how code is structu... |
I eventually found that Sebastian, who was the creator of Babel, he wasn't able to maintain the Babel core and some other side projects, so I got involved in a smaller project called [Babel ESLint](https://github.com/babel/babel-eslint), which is a compatibility layer between Babel and ESLint. Slowly, through that, I m... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** There are other maintainers now though, right? Did they come on later, or were they around at the time? |
**Henry Zhu:** So when Babel 6 got released, a bunch of us started helping out, like Logan, but some people come and go. Amjad was a big part of Babel while he was at Facebook, but he left us to do a startup. Right now we have, I guess, three core maintainers. We have Logan Smith and Daniel Chandler, and everyone else ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I've actually heard from a couple people, they think that Babel and Webpack are maintained by Facebook because it's associated with React, and I'm constantly saying "No, they have nothing to do with that..." So the project really is held together by independent contributors and not by some company, r... |
**Henry Zhu:** \[03:54\] Right. That happens all the time. I got invited to a Google conference called BlinkOn, and Sean (at Webpack) was also there... And for all the people I talked to, I was like "Oh yeah, I work on Babel", and then at least ten people are like "Oh, do you work at Facebook?" I was like, "No, I've ne... |
So yeah, I think in their minds, because the way people use Babel is through React, everyone just thinks that it is a Facebook project, but... Yeah, it's totally not under any company, and it's not even under where I work either. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Can you talk a little bit about -- because I think Babel is your first maintainer experience, right? ...going from a contributor to a maintainer, and just how that felt in terms of any impostor syndrome you were feeling about it, or any fear of having to manage a very large and complex project. |
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