The Beer Driven Devs

Jimmy Bogard: Sustainability and Community from an OSS Veteran

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This time it was Liam’s turn with the plague, but like a trooper he showed up anyway.

In this episode, Matt and Liam are joined by Jimmy Bogard (MediatR, AutoMapper) for a candid conversation about the realities of open source in the .NET world.

We explore:

  • Why some libraries emerge from years of real-world pain rather than a weekend side project
  • How tools like MediatR and MassTransit grew out of necessity and hardened through production use
  • The gap between what consumers think goes into a library and what it actually takes to build and maintain one
  • The sustainability problem—what happens when “free as in beer” collides with developer burnout
  • How the .NET ecosystem, Microsoft, and the wider community could better support maintainers

    • Along the way Jimmy shares hard-won lessons from solving the same problems over and over again—until the solution itself became the library. It’s a perspective that’s easy to underestimate if you’ve never maintained widely used open source.

    🍻 Tonight’s Drinks:

    Matt – Water
    Liam – Lemsip
    Jimmy – Definitely not Foster’s 🍺

    Any Likes 👍, Shares 📣, Subscriptions 🔔, and Love ❤️ go a long way to helping us continue this podcast.

    Cheers! 🍻

    🔗 Links from the Episode:

    • Jimmy’s site
    • Lucky Penny Software (New commercial home of Automapper and MediatR)
    • SDK Bin
    • OpenSource Maintenance Fee
    • How to Build Sustainable Open Source Software Projects (Aaron Stannard)
      • ...more
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      The Beer Driven DevsBy Matt Goldman & Liam Elliott