Broken Promises in Open Source
summary
Open source communities show measurable burnout as heated threads and long GitHub arguments force contributors to stop participating. A concrete example is adding promises in Node core where a rejected promise’s catch swallowing unrelated errors produces real bugs and fuels endless debate. A weekend prototype called node OS weekend project drew heavy criticism and usable patches but ended with author withdrawal. Techniques that help: structured facilitation, echoing back definitions, and treating feature risk as shared work.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Start
- 12:19Jacob enters the Promises fray
- 13:42GITHUB
- 16:09coffee script MVC frameworks; message queue libraries; job runners; etc
- 16:55NODE-OS
- 18:44ASYNC LISTENER
- 19:19HELP CONTRIBUTE TO NODE.JS
- 20:49LONG ARGUMENT THREADS
- 23:42HERO CULTURE
- 27:14IN-PERSON IS DIFFERENT THAN ONLINE
- 28:15GROUP FACILITATION
- 28:34GIVE SPACE TO QUIET VOICES
- 29:49SHARE RISK OF NEW IDEAS
- 30:48HEAR EVERYONE SO EVERYONE CAN LISTEN
- 31:44TAKE TIME TO DEFINE YOUR WORDS
- 33:30BE MINDFUL OF YOUR OWN ACTIONS
- 34:10BE TACTICAL WITH OTHERS
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