Edinburgh-based open source maintainer and engineering leader with 18 years of experience reducing developer friction and scaling projects used by tens of millions. Homebrew Project Leader and maintainer since 2009, Former GitHub Principal Engineer (#232, 2013), where I shipped GitHub Sponsors, Merge Queue, repository archiving, Open Source Friday amongst other things. Author of Git in Practice, writer and frequent conference speaker on open source, automation and Git.
Things you might need to know about open source:
- Open source maintainers owe you nothing. We do this because we want to, not because users are entitled to our time.
- Entitlement is rife in open source. Entitlement is one of the fastest ways to burn maintainers out and make projects worse.
- Open source economics matter (and aren't just about money). If you want sustainable projects, you need to value maintainer time.
- The open source contributor funnel is how you grow sustainable community.
- Stop mentoring first-time contributors. Contributors need documentation, automation and scalable systems, not maintainer hand-holding.
- Robot pedantry, human empathy: automate repetitive correctness checks and keep humans for judgment.