James Long joined the show to talk about his recent post, “Why I’m Frequently Absent from Open Source”. He shared several points in his blog post that struck a chord with us, so we invited him on the show to talk through the gritty details and peel back the layers of open source — the people involved, sustainability, the responsibility, the guilt, and the balance it takes to keep it all together.

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Featuring:

• James Long – Website, GitHub, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

James recently left Mozilla and shortly after he launched an open source project called Prettier - an opinionated JavaScript formatter. It was a great success.

Needless to say, James experienced that overwhelming feeling many indie open source developers feel when faced with all the work required to maintain a successful open source project — the issues, feature requests, PRs, extra time required, and all the communication can really be a burden, especially when you have a full-time contracting gig and a family. His blog post was a response to this feeling as well as a love letter to his wife.

BONUS LINK (from James) — Watch Hammock Driven Development by Rich Hickey

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!