What its like to be a full time open source maintainer
summary
Maintains Vue full‑time for over three years, juggling 115 issues per month in core and over 200 issues across the organisation, reaching nearly 10,000 closed issues with ~170 open; prioritises minimal reproduction bug reports, enforces clear issue/PR templates, delegates to a core team, automates CI and GitHub workflows with CircleCI and bots, turns off push notifications to avoid constant context switching, and balances freedom against financial and burnout risk while keeping the project sustainable.
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chapters (22)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:58Why Did I Go Full-time?
- 4:08Freedom!
- 6:07Impact & Fulfillment
- 8:14Fame (not quite)
- 9:24Freedom vs. Risk
- 11:05Mental Challenge 1: Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt
- 11:58How I try to deal with it: Understand what you are really looking for
- 14:00Impact vs. Responsibility
- 14:12Outside 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.
- 16:16Vue receives around 150 issues per month in the core repo alone. We are going to reach #10000 by mid 2019.
- 16:52Mental Challenge 2: Self-imposed Guilt
- 20:52Guilt can lead to deteriorating work-life balance and eventually lead to burnout.
- 21:28Acknowledge the boundary
- 23:40People vs. The Social Overhead
- 28:43Publicity & Pressure
- 29:46Know your priorities
- 30:09Criticism & Negativity
- 32:14Some tips
- 32:27Trust and delegate
- 33:08Get the priorities straight
- 33:27Enjoy it
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