text stringlengths 0 1.15k |
|---|
The interesting thing is that Ryan didn't actually quit open source; he still occasionally contributes, but the big thing we figured out is if quitting was the right decision for him... And you might be surprised what his response is. Stay tuned. |
**Break:** \[18:30\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I wanna get into this whole time when you burned out for a minute. So before you burned out, before you wrote this blog post, what were your days and your weeks like? What were you doing on the daily? |
**Ryan Bigg:** On the daily I'd get up in the morning and I'd check my inbox and see what open source stuff there was; I'd reply to issues that people had left comments on overnight, and then I would go to work and do my full day of work. On the train home I would check my inbox, and then before going to bed I'd check ... |
The same thing happened at the end of my Spree term. That was a similar kind of feeling where I had all this work to do and it felt endless, and I kind of just collapsed in me. With Spree for instance, there were several days, I reckon, several months of this where I would wake up and there would be 200 new messages in... |
When I quit open source in 2015 I felt the same way. I had all this work to do, I was trying to write Multitenancy with Rail, the second edition of that, and I had my wife -- I was trying to spend time with my wife and not be feeling guilty that I'm having a good time while all these open source projects are sitting th... |
It was a really difficult time, and I just felt like something has to give; either I have to spend less time with my wife, I have to spend less time at work, or I have to spend less time on open source. The wife situation isn't going away, absolutely not; that would be terrible. Absolutely terrible if that went away. W... |
What happened after that was from November through to (I think it was) June or July 2016, I was able to complete Multitenancy with Rails, and I got a big thrill out of that when I finally did complete it. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** You mentioned that you were a community manager at Spree. A lot of people, when they go for these kings of roles, they go for them because part of that role is usually working on open source. So I think the assumption when you said community manager was that a lot of that open source work was part of... |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, there was just so much extra stuff I just couldn't get done in the regular work day. Because the work day wasn't just all about the open source issues and code and pull requests and documentation, it was about replying to users on IRC, there were long discussions there; big issue threads on GitHub ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Had you tried anything prior to straight up quitting? Like "Maybe I just need to manage my email better" or whatever, and then did you just hit a point where it was like "Nope. No, this is more than that." |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, I kept trying to manage the email, but it's hard. "This news stuff that wasn't important, bounce it to the next day" sort of thing; I was trying to ask for support from Spree (the organization), I was just asking for somebody else to help maintain the open source issues, because that was just me do... |
\[24:04\] There was interest from this company called FreeRunning Technology who is now called Stembolt, and they were doing some open source maintenance, but they weren't as interested as they are now. They actually run the fork of Spree called Solidus and they're maintaining that, because after I quit, Spree kind of ... |
So yeah, it was just hard. I did try to manage it better, I did try to get support, and I guess I just didn't reach out to enough people or the right people to get that kind of support. I felt like that was the only thing I could do, it was quit. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** What was the response like when you wrote that post? Were people understanding? Yeah, people were very understanding of the quitting open source part; more understanding than I thought they would be. I thought people would be like "But, but hold on, I've still got this issue... Can you just look at th... |
Other people in the community were actually volunteering their time to help out. I've got this guy called [Johnny Shields](https://github.com/johnnyshields) who's maintaining [by_star](https://github.com/radar/by_star/), John Hawthorn ([jhawthorn](https://github.com/jhawthorn) on GitHub) is maintaining [Paranoia](https... |
Redis - I was maintaining the Redis suite of gems But still, these projects will have a single maintainer. I wish there was a community around that was interested in maintaining these, not just people who are using it passively, but people interested in actually the ongoing support of these projects. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It's funny, this makes me think about Mikeal's post actually... When Nolan Lawson recently wrote the post about starting to feel burned out by open source and Mikeal wrote a response just being like "You need to step away in those situations, and someone will always take over" - Mikeal, I'm putting wo... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, I wouldn't say always, but stepping away is an opportunity for other people to step up, right? |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Right. That was the thing that stuck out in my head about your post. It sounds like there's often this fear that if I step away people might be mad, or everything will disappear or fall down or whatever, but often times people are okay, and if you just say you're not doing it, then you're just not doi... |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah. I should have just asked for support. It's absolutely what should have happened. It shouldn't just come down to quitting, it should be like "Hey, by the way, I'm having a hard time here. Here's what I need help with." But it's the anxiety about it; I couldn't phrase it that way before. Of course, w... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, I think when it's that overwhelming, the right thing probably is to just say "You know what, I'm stepping away entirely." Maybe six months before that it might have been good to be like "These are the things that I need help with", but once you're in a certain point, your mental health is more ... |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah. And I do feel a lot more mentally healthy (is that a thing?), I feel happier now that I've got less responsibilities in terms of open source work. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I was wondering about that, because you still make occasional contributions, and it seems like you're still paying attention to things in open source. Was that post more just about having to draw this line in the sand and say "I'm not maintaining projects, and I can contribute when I feel like it", or... |
**Ryan Bigg:** It's true, I do continue to maintain some open source projects. I've got this open source project called Elastic which talks to ElasticSearch servers using Elixir. I actually use it at work, so when I'm working on that, I maintain it at work, and I never do any maintenance on it outside of work, because ... |
\[28:10\] And then I also have another open source project that I'm maintaining called Twist, which is my book review software, which I've been tinkering on for about six years. It's open source, but nobody else contributes to it, pretty much it's just me. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm curious just to hear more about how you handed off your projects and facilitated that process of stepping down. You said you just put out a call for volunteers and you found some maintainers; was there anything that you officially had to do on your repos? Just for other people that might be intere... |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yes. So when I quit, I left a big note in the readme saying "This project is no longer maintained. If you want to maintain it, please contact me at ryanbigg.com." I also put that in the blog post, too. I've got several emails from people who were interested in maintaining it, and I was like "Well, these ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That I wanna hear more about. I noticed you had something on -- I think it was translation-gem maybe... You were helping to triage issues, and then expressed a little bit of frustration that whoever brought it up wasn't helping out. |
**Ryan Bigg:** Oh, you saw that too... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I was just wondering, how do you know who's gonna be a "good maintainer" or committed maintainer? How do you actually pick someone to hand off to? |
**Ryan Bigg:** So there was this guy in the community who I've known since I was a pup... There was this guy called Jason King, and he has a lot of opinions, and some of them are right. This particular opinion was that the i18n gem was unmaintained and abandoned and nobody loved it, and Sven is a horrible person for do... |
I'm probably going to step away from the i18n project now that it's done and maintained in a relatively healthy state. So if anyone else wants to step up and maintain... I'm sure Sven and I can find somebody else who can do that. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Do you feel like because you sort of made a conscious decision to step in, did that make it easier to contribute where maybe others didn't? Is it just you cared more than other people? It sounds like it was an easy problem to solve, or you kind of just came in, did it and then you left. |
**Ryan Bigg:** That's a tough question. I think it needed to have two things - it needed to have somebody who cared somebody who had time; well, that person needed to have both of those things. They needed to have the care and they needed to have the time. I happened to have both at the time, because I'd finished writi... |
If anyone else feels the same way, I'm sure Sven and I could find somebody else to maintain it as well over the long haul. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Would you recommend handing -- for people that are newer to open source and looking to build their reputation, would you trust someone like that to take over a project that has been handed off, versus a project that they started themselves? Does that make sense? Is that the right kind of role? |
**Ryan Bigg:** \[32:02\] I wouldn't recommend, like, for Sven and I to hand off i18n to somebody who's new to open source. I reckon what we could do is have this handover period of probably a year where we monitor the issues and just give guidance, that kind of thing, so if people are interested in open source, they ca... |
So yeah, I think if new open source contributors wanna come in, by all means... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Do you feel like you had that mentorship for yourself as a maintainer? |
**Ryan Bigg:** In the early days no, but with practice and Spree and a lot of the community discussions around that I believe I did get a lot of mentorship there. And there was also a lot of people who kind of grate on you a little bit. There's this one guy - I'm not gonna name him, because you know, name is withheld t... |
So I get on my bike and I ride two kilometers, a mile from my house, and I have an accident. I come off my bike and break my left arm. So I'm mad from this guy, and then this car cut me off and I broke my arm and I just cracked it really hard. I pick my bike up off the road and threw it over to the curb and I just went... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[laughs\] Worth it! |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, it's that kind of thing -- in open source people can be discouraged because of the hatred and vitriol and entitlement; every open source maintainer comes across it. I know Aaron Patterson talks about it a lot on Rails, and there's other Rails contributors who talk about it a lot... That sense of en... |
One person who I think does this really ridiculously well, who always seems cheery and happy and chirpy is Jose Valim on the Elixir project. He consistently is happy, treats people with respect even if they're being a bit blunt or a bit obtuse, and he's just an inspiration absolutely. I wanna be more like Jose. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It seems like you still pick up new projects here and there... Do you think that to some extent you enjoy picking up a new project and getting involved in new projects more than the inevitable maintenance of them? Is that kind of part of why this continues to happen as well? |
**Ryan Bigg:** I'm a sucker for it. I'm such a sucker for it. With i18n I think I am not going to maintain that any longer with anything else, but the Elastic package - I'm probably going to maintain that as long as I work at Culture Amp or as long as I need it. But I try and realize that I'm slipping back into that li... |
\[35:59\] I try and catch myself doing that, and I go "No, that wasn't healthy before, and it's probably not gonna be healthy now, so let's just not do that. Let's find something else to distract our brain with", so that's what I'm doing with my writing at the moment; that's my distraction from open source, if that mak... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Have you had any projects that you picked up like that or sort of working on that then did grow the community and that you were able to just kind of step away from without people noticing? Are there any practices that you might have learned along the way? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Paranoia is probably the only project that did that. It's in accessparanoia.alternative/equivalent for active record, and then when I did quit this open source work there was a substantial community around - I guess substantial is like 20 people - it who were using it actively. One guy stepped up and tha... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.