text stringlengths 0 1.15k |
|---|
**Nadia Eghbal:** The thing is it all happened pretty naturally. I didn't intentionally try to promote it in any way. I think probably the biggest contributing factor in Vue's popularity in China is because of my answers on Zhihu which is sort of like the Chinese equivalent of Quora. |
\[11:59\] A lot of people directly ask questions about Vue and then ask me to answer it. A lot of times, when I have nothing better to do, I just answer those questions. I think that helped people a lot; it made them feel connected to this project more, because they were able to see the direct interaction with the auth... |
An equivalent example would be Dan Abramov interacts a lot with React users, and I think that helps a lot of users connect with React better. So I guess that's the positive part of having someone representing a framework being really active on social networks. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That's awesome. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I've seen this in the Node community, too. There are certain projects where because the maintainers are in China and available on the social networks, there is just more localized support for it. It's not like those projects aren't used anywhere else, but they certainly have more of a following... |
**Evan You:** Yeah, I think one of the core maintainers of Koa is Chinese, and a lot of the active Node contributors are from Alibaba, because they use Node.js pretty heavily in production, and they've open sourced a lot of modules. I think it's a very good thing; they contributed a lot to Node.js's popularity in China... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** From my perspective at least, being newer to open source, a lot of conversation at least seems dominated by the U.S., Europe and Australia... For the both you - have you noticed that developers outside of these areas can feel siloed off? How do you make them feel involved? It sounds like part of what ... |
**Evan You:** I think primarily it's still the language and partly the cultural barriers - they're kind of inevitable. A lot of the developers in China - they can read and understand English, but a lot of them don't feel comfortable communicating in English. It's a lot of extra effort for them to say... The simplest ex... |
I think this is just a natural barrier for them to be able to contribute more, which is also why programmers in China often say "English is as important as your programming skills if you want to become a really good programmer." Because so much knowledge and so much open source work and so much resources are written in... |
Most of the programmers actually can read English, but when they try to use it to convey some of the more subtle concepts, it becomes a struggle. I think that's the primary reason for them to be less active on the main stage of open source. But because I'm Chinese, I'm able to get a peek at the Chinese open source scen... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[15:59\] Yeah, in the Node project we have some metrics, and it's huge. It's like 12% of all of our users, which is like a lot of people. |
Moving along a little bit, I just wanted to know... You've taken a step to kind of go full-time working on Vue.js, or at least attempted to. What was that decision like? What made you wanna start working just on your open source project full-time, rather than also doing a lot of the other work that you've been up to? |
**Evan You:** Yeah, so I was working for Meteor in 2015, I think... Wait - when was that? Yeah, 2016. Early 2016, that was when I started working on Vue full-time. Before that I was working for Meteor. At Meteor I already started feeling the pull of this unsustainability of having a day job and at the same time maintai... |
I started seriously thinking about which do I actually want to work on more, and I think the answer was "I want to work on Vue more." So that's when I started to think "Is there any possible way for me to turn this into my full-time job, instead of something I can only attend to in my spare time?" I guess that's kind o... |
I thought that there were people sustaining themselves by creating content, and I compare that to Vue.js or I compare that to an open source project. I felt like "I'm working on this project and it's creating value for people. If I'm creating value for people, is there any way for them to somehow give back in a financi... |
So I started the campaign. I didn't really think too much about it, and I just threw it out there. It turns out people actually wanted to give me money, and some of the companies were really generous. I had the tiers of like $100/month, $500/month, and there was one tier that was $2,000/month. I put it out there just t... |
That was a really huge help in the beginning. They did it for six months, and that was probably like -- if it wasn't for them, I don't think the campaign would ever grow to what it is today. Today we have like $9,000-ish a month, which is already enough for me to somehow sustain the family and all that. |
\[20:17\] I still consider myself extremely lucky to have pulled this off. Whenever some other open source maintainer asks me for advice, I'm always hesitant to recommend them going this way because I don't feel this is something that's easily repeatable, and it really depends on how much traction you have gained, and ... |
I was almost able to sustain myself, and it just kept growing until it became -- today I'm pretty proud to say I'm fully sustained by open source work. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That's awesome. |
After the break, Nadia and Mikeal talk with Evan about how he's been able to make open source his full-time job, treating it like a job for better balance in life, better balance with his family. We also talk about an often uncomfortable topic - funding. Who should get paid? Where should money be spent? Should this pro... |
**Break:** \[21:47\] |
**Evan You:** I felt that I wanted to work on Vue more as my full-time job... And I generally felt much, much better after I switched to working on Vue full-time, because now I can actually treat it like a job. I set hours for myself, I don't have to stay up late at night anymore, so I can actually spend time with fami... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** How many other contributors were there to the project when you started the Patreon campaign, and what does the team look like right now? |
**Evan You:** I can't remember exactly how many when I started the Patreon campaign... I would say probably only a few. Today we have a pretty decently sized team, but we have like 20-ish people in the Vue.js organization on GitHub. |
\[24:08\] The team is pretty loosely organized. Everyone is just contributing on a volunteer basis, and we don't have a very formal structure of assigning people tasks or expecting them to do something by a deadline. |
The team also grows pretty organically. Whenever someone makes quality contributions on a regular basis for a while, I just invite them to the organization and ask them "Do you want to do this on a regular basis? Do you want to become a part of the team?" but overall it's still pretty loose. I don't really feel comfort... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It's pretty easy to put yourself in that same position, being that you were just doing that recently. You wouldn't want people assigning things to you when you were working on it in your own time, right? |
**Evan You:** Yeah, definitely. But I have to give a shoutout here, because the team is doing such an amazing job at dealing with the most tedious part of open source work, which is triaging the incoming issues. It think the amount of issues we get across the whole Vue.js organization is totally becoming unmanageable f... |
Other than that, obviously some of them also make high-quality contributions to the codebase itself, which are really helpful. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** That's interesting... I wanna hear more about that. You have a growing community, people are taking on more responsibility, a lot of new stuff is rolling in... How did you end up pricing the Patreon campaign? Because you know that you need your time, but like you were saying, you're already doing pre... |
How did you kind of price the Patreon campaign and what was the goal in terms of supplementing what was already going on on that community side? |
**Evan You:** I'm not sure how you would define pricing the Patreon campaign. It was more like... I just set the numbers based on just jumping up in tiers. I didn't really think that much about how to distribute it between contributors at that time, and I think Open Collective didn't even exist back then. Patreon was k... |
\[28:16\] At this moment, we're trying to somewhat -- one of the alternative ways we try to give back to these contributors is, for example, Chris has got a deal for working on educational content for O'Reilly, because he's part of the core team and we connected with O'Reilly. He was able to get that, which offers pret... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That's awesome. |
**Evan You:** Yeah, but we just feel that direct allocation of money is somewhat tricky, because it's really hard to properly quantify it and we still don't feel there is a very elegant solution to this problem. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I mean, the Patreon campaign is really set up to fund you, really specifically... In fact, you could extend this to some other -- if you had another idea, you could allocate some work to that, right? People really are backing you and investing in you, even though you probably have enough left o... |
We've actually heard from other people too, it's like when you get money for the project, it's actually hard to figure out what to spend it on... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Right... What is the project, versus what are you doing... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, right. But when people are funding you, they're literally saying "I want you to work on open source full-time." |
**Evan You:** Yeah, that's a different way to look at it. In some way, this is basically the majority chunk of my income now. I need to use this money to pay the bills, I need to put these into my savings, even pay for retiring and all that stuff... So in some way Patreon is more directly connected to the creator, the ... |
It's a little different from the mindset or the model that Open Collective is pushing forward, where the funding is going to the project. I think it's an interesting dynamic, and it kind of depends on how the project is structured and how the creator or the maintainers want to frame the story. |
I just feel like this is an interesting difference between some of the different funding models that we see in some of the more popular open source projects. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I find it really fascinating. One of the hazards that we keep hearing about is that when you start paying some people, other people don't feel as valued sometimes... And it's interesting - you're not running into that. You actually have a pretty thriving community that's still growing, and even... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** And it's really interesting to see how there are like other benefits to being a regular contributor that might not be "I'm getting paid to work on those, but my reputation grows, and then I have this book deal..." That's really interesting to think about. My brain's going in like 100 directions right ... |
**Evan You:** \[32:01\] Yeah, and another aspect that I wanted to mention is one of the core members actually started to work on a project that's fully dedicated to Vue resources... Kind of like making Vue videos and all that. I think it's somewhat like a way for him to both contribute to Vue and provide more content f... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Interesting. Do you say that was a Patreon campaign? |
**Evan You:** It's not a Patreon campaign, it's more like a subscription service, similar to Laracasts. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It'd be interesting to think about, like, if different contributors feel motivated to raise money to work on Vue for their own time, I guess, but it's still different from raising money for Vue; it's "Raising for my work on Vue", in this aspect. |
**Evan You:** Yeah. It's something Chris has been thinking of, too. He backed off, because he felt it could be distracting to have multiple campaigns that are in fact for the same project, and I think this increasingly reveals the problem between "How do we support the project? Do we support the people behind the proje... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.