11ty creator Zach Leatherman is taking the open source site generator fully independent in 2024 and he’s back on the pod to tell us why, how & what we all can do to help.

Birk Jernström from Polar joins the show to tell us all about the creator platform for developers: why he built it, how it works, why it works how it works, what’s in store for the future & we even give Birk some super deep UX feedback on the funding flow.

Today we speak with Ellie Huxtable, the creator of a magical open source tool for syncing, searching & backing up your shell history. Along the way we learn all about the sync service, why she likes Rust, the branding / marketing of the project, how she quit her job to work on it full time, the business model & so much more.

Daniel Ehrenberg (software engineer at Bloomberg, web standards author / champion & VP of ECMA International) joins us to discuss new features that have landed in JavaScript and to preview what’s cooking in various standards bodies across the web platform.

We cover a wide array (get it?) of topics from improvements to built-ins such as Promises, Maps & Sets, as well as new primitives like Records, Tuples & Temporal. We round out this epic discussion with a look at cross-project standardization efforts like WinterCG, open source sustainability & how Bloomberg’s open source program gives back in important projects in the web ecosystem.

This week on The Changelog we’re continuing our Maintainer Month series by taking to you back to the hallway track of The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit North America 2023 in Vancouver, Canada. Today’s anthology episode features: Stormy Peters (VP of Communities at GitHub), Dr. Dawn Foster (Director of Open Source Community Strategy at VMware), and Angie Byron (Drupal Core Product Manager and Community Director at Aiven).

Special thanks to our friends at GitHub for sponsoring us to attend this conference as part of Maintainer Month.

This week we’re celebrating Maintainer Month along with our friends at GitHub. Open source runs the world, but who runs open source? Maintainers. Open source maintainers are behind the software we use everyday, but they don’t always have the community or support they need. That’s why we’re celebrating open source maintainers during the month of May. Today’s conversation features Alyssa Wright (Bloomberg), Chad Whitacre (Sentry), and Duane O’Brien (Creator of the FOSS Contributor Fund and framework). We get into all the details, the why, the hows, and the struggles involved for companies to support open source.

After years of working for Google on the Go Team, Filippo Valsorda quit last year to experiment with more sustainable paths for open source maintainers. Good news, it worked! Filippo is now a full-time open source maintainer and he joins Jerod on this episode to tell everyone exactly how he’s making the equivalent to his total compensation package at Google in open source.

We’ve been using Parker Selbert’s Oban library for years and he even helped us hold it right by improving our open source implementation!

So, Jerod invited him Backstage to discuss the library, how we’re using it, Parker’s plan to make it financially sustainable, his “freedom number” of Oban Pro subscribers, and a bunch of other random stuff along the way. Let’s go!

Zach Leatherman recently announced he will now be working on Eleventy – his simpler static site generator – while continuing to work at Netlify. What makes Eleventy special? How’d he convince Netlify to let him do this? What does this mean for the project’s future? How many questions in a row can we type into this textarea? Tune in to find out!

Tobie Langel, Open source strategist and Principal at UnlockOpen, joins Chris, Feross, and Amal to discuss recent widespread incidents affecting the JavaScript community (and breaking CI builds) around the globe. Two widely used npm libraries were self-sabotaged by their single maintainer, yet again, highlighting the many gaps in our OSS supply chain security, sustainability and overall practices. We explore all these topics and solution on what our ecosystem needs to be more resilient to these types of attacks in the future.

This week we’re talking with Pia Mancini about the latest updates to the mission of Open Collective. Earlier this year Open Collective announced “Funds for Open Source.” The idea is simple, make it easy for companies to invest in open source, and they will. Also, since recording this episode, Pia and the team at Open Collective along with Gitcoin announced fundoss.org as part of Maintainer Week announcements. And right now, they have a matching fund of $75,000 dollars funding open source that you can support.

Tailwind CSS creator Adam Wathan joins Jerod, Nick, & Feross for an in-depth discussion of his trending utility-first CSS framework. We cover why everyone complains about CSS, how Tailwind began and how it gained popularity, how developers use with Tailwind and integrate it into their workflows, and how Adam has managed to build a business around the project. Thanks, Bette Midler!

Caleb Porzio is the creator & maintainer of Livewire, AlpineJS, and more. His latest open source endeavor was announced as “sponsorware”, which means it lived in a private repo (only available to Caleb’s GitHub Sponsors) until he hit a set sponsorship threshold, at which point it was open sourced.

On this episode, we talk through this sponsorware experiment in-depth. We learn how he dreamt it up, how it went (spoiler: very well), and how he had to change his mindset on 2 things in order to make sustainability possible.

David Cramer joined the show to talk about the recent license change of Sentry to the Business Source License from a BSD 3-clause license. We talk about the details that triggered this change, the specifics of the BSL license and its required parameters, the threat to commercial open source products like Sentry, his concerns for the “open core” model, and what the future of open source might look like in light of protections-oriented source-available licenses like the BSL becoming more common.

Devon Zuegel is an Open Source Product Manager at GitHub. She’s also one of the key people responsible for making GitHub Sponsors a thing. We talk with Devon about how she came to GitHub to develop GitHub Sponsors, the months of research she did to learn how to best solve the sustainability problem of open source, why GitHub is now addressing this issue, the various ways and models of addressing maintainers’ financial needs, and Devon also shared what’s in store for the future of GitHub Sponsors.

We’re talking with Mehan Jayasuriya program officer at Mozilla about MOSS — the Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) program which recognizes, celebrates, and supports open source projects. Earlier this year we caught the “MOSS 2018 Year in Review” blog post — this post highlighted many of their efforts in 2018 so we reached out to talk through the history, goals, and impact of this very generous project.

In our last episode of the year, I talk with Maria Boland Ploessl. Maria’s path to technology has been interesting to say the least. A Saint Paul native, she studied Spanish and Latin American studies in college. In 2016, after living in a few different cities (even a year-long stint in Brazil), she moved back to Minnesota. Now, she’s the Executive Director of Minnestar, a non-profit organization with the aim of supporting and growing Minnesota’s tech community.

Maria talks to me about what Minnestar does, the work they’re doing to bring more people of underrepresented groups into tech, married life and how she’s grown from it, and parenthood.

Jeremy Fuksa has had a rough few years. After deciding to go out on his own, his third year in business was filled with anxiety. Going back to working a full-time job may sound like a failure to some, but Jeremy doesn’t look at it that way.

He talks to me about his unique skill set, dealing with anxiety and depression, and how his recent experience has taught him some great lessons.

Adam and Jerod talk with Dominic Tarr, creator of event-stream, the IO library that made recent news as the latest malicious package in the npm registry. event-stream was turned malware, designed to target a very specific development environment and harvest account details and private keys from Bitcoin accounts.

They talk through Dominic’s backstory as a prolific contributor to open source, his stance on this package, his work in open source, the sequence of events around the hack, how we can and should handle maintainer-ship of open source infrastructure over the full life-cycle of the code’s usefulness, and what some best practices are for moving forward from this kind of attack.

Joseph Jacks, the Founder and General Partner of OSS Capital joined the show to share his plans for funding the future generation of commercial open source software based companies. This is a growing landscape of $100M+ revenue companies ~13 years in the making that’s just now getting serious early attention and institutional backing — and we talk through many of those details with Joseph.

We cover the whys and hows, why OSS now, deep details around licensing implications, and we speculate the types of open source software that makes sense for the types of investing Joseph and other plan to do.

In this special bonus call, Adam and Jerod talk with Allen “Gunner” Gunn about the Sustain Summit. They talk about what it is, the kind of conversations that happen there, issues the open source community are facing right now, and how Sustain stands out from traditional “unconferences.”

Sustain 2017 was a big hit, and this year’s event should be even better. Join us!

Adam and Jerod talk to Brett Cannon, core contributor to Python and a fantastic representative of the Python community. They talked through various details surrounding a talk and blog post he wrote titled “Setting expectations for open source participation” and covered questions like: What is the the purpose of open source? How do you sustain open source? And what’s the goal?

They even talked through typical scenarios in open source and how kindness and recognizing that there’s a human on the other end of every action can really go a long way.

Eryn O’Neil grew up in the southwestern suburbs of Chicago. When it came time for college, it was easy for her to move a few states over and go to college in a small town in Iowa. She now lives in Minneapolis, and after years of being self-employed, she just finished a months-long journey to find her next job.

Eryn talks to me about being the first female engineering manager at her new company, what excites her about technology, the hurdles of married life, and staying healthy in a demanding industry.

Mahdi Yusuf worked a startup in his twenties and wasn’t worried too much about his health. When he quit that job, he decided to take better care of himself and lost fifty pounds. Now, he’s the CTO of Gyroscope, a startup that aims to be the operating system for the human body, but ever since joining, has gained weight back.

Mahdi talks to me about how Gyroscope is trying to help people understand their bodies better, growing up with a love for computers, and trying to be healthy with a busy life.

After a very difficult 2014 that put Justin Dorfman in the hospital, he vowed to never go back. Justin has Bipolar I disorder, so coming to terms with his limitations and the sacrifices he needs to make to stay healthy hasn’t been easy. He talks to me about his early BMX dreams, his transition from engineering to marketing, and the stigma around mental health.