Open source

Building and maintaining an open-source project is hard work. That observation is about as insightful as noting the religious affiliation of the pope or the scatological habits of woodland bears.

Nolan Lawson wrote a lengthy post describing what it feels like to be an open-source maintainer.

Outside your door stands a line of a few hundred people. They are patiently waiting for you to answer their questions, complaints, pull requests, and feature requests.

You want to help all of them, but for now you’re putting it off. Maybe you had a hard day at work, or you’re tired, or you’re just trying to enjoy a weekend with your family and friends.

But if you go to github.com/notifications, there’s a constant reminder of how many people are waiting

Most of the comments on the post are from people saying “Yup, I hear ya!”

Jan wrote a follow-up post called Sustainable Open Source: The Maintainers Perspective or: How I Learned to Stop Caring and Love Open Source:

Just because there are people with problems in front of your door, that doesn’t mean they are your problems. You can choose to make them yours, but you want to be very careful about what to care about.

There’s also help at hand in the shape of Open Source Guides created by Nadia Eghbal:

A collection of resources for individuals, communities, and companies who want to learn how to run and contribute to an open source project.

I’m sure Mark can relate to all of the tales of toil that come with being an open-source project maintainer. He’s been working flat-out on Fractal, sometimes at work, but often at home too.

Fractal isn’t really a Clearleft project, at least not in the same way that something like Silverback or UX London is. We’re sponsoring Fractal as much as we can, but an open-source project doesn’t really belong to anyone; everyone is free to fork it and take it. But I still want to make sure that Mark and Danielle have time at work to contribute to Fractal. It’s hard to balance that with the bill-paying client work though.

I invited Remy around to chat with them last week. It was really valuable. Mind you, Remy was echoing many of the same observations made in Nolan’s post about how draining this can be.

So nobody here is under any illusions that this open-source lark is to be entered into lightly. It can be a gruelling exercise. But then it can also be very, very rewarding. One kind word from somebody using your software can make your day. I was genuinely pleased as punch when Danish agency Shift sent Mark a gift to thank him for all his hard work on Fractal.

People can be pretty darn great (which I guess is an underlying principle of open source).

I, Maintainer

Maintaining an open source project is a rollercoaster ride with high peaks and very low troughs.

Release frequency is down. Questions increasingly go unanswered. Issues remain in a triage, unresolved state. Uncertainty and frustration brew within the community room.

Brian’s experience with Pattern Lab very much mirrors Mark’s experience with Fractal. The pressure. The stress. But there’s also the community.

A maintainer must keep the needs of their project, their community, and their own needs in constant harmony.

This is hard!