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**Ryan Bigg:** I realized that when I come home grumpy it's probably not a good thing -- if it's a single day, like, everyone has bad days. People ask me like "When does programming become easy?" It doesn't. You just have more easier days than you have hard days. You still have those hard days. And when you have those ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Hypothetically, is there anything in open source that would need to change or that could change that would make you come back and start contributing more regularly? |
**Ryan Bigg:** You could pay me to do it. You could pay me what I get paid to work full-time on proprietary software to work on open source software, just like I did on Spree. That definitely helps a lot. To come back to open source projects -- I just simply don't have time anymore. I've got my wife, I've got my daught... |
When I do have free time is on the train to work - it's half an hour in and half an hour out. I spend that time writing usually, so there's really no time for open source. |
If you gave me a full-time job where my purview was literally "contribute to open source however you see fit" and you paid me a livable wage, by all means, I'm open to job offers. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Good answer. When I've seen you advocate for people getting paid to work on open source, do you think that just has to come from companies, versus raising money for yourself, or whatever? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, I'm a hard left-wing kind of guy and socialism is high on my agenda, and it's not high on people who have the money, it's high on people who don't have the money. With regards to that, while I would love if Culture Amp would hire me purely just to contribute to open source projects that they use, o... |
\[59:55\] It's not like we have a day where it's like "Go and work on open source, it's fine...", because it doesn't make sense financially for the company to do that; you're wasting the company's -- that's why they say it's wasting the company's time contributing to these open source projects. But the way I personally... |
For instance, let's say Spree, which uses the Active Merchant gem extensively - if that was maintained by one person... It's maintained by Shopify, but if that was maintained by one person, and that one person decided to quit, and that project then fell into disrepair, Spree would have to pick up the maintenance of Act... |
With a project that isn't directly important to a business, the business doesn't see any value in contributing to that open source project. Culture Amp doesn't see any value in, well, I'm speaking for another organization. My view of Culture Amp, my experience of Culture Amp is that there isn't a view of "We should con... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** So wait, are you advocating for only in a situation when a company directly benefits should they encourage those contributions? Do you think that's right, or do you think it should be different? I can't tell which side you are. |
**Ryan Bigg:** I'm sorry, yes, I did speak for a while... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It's good, you spoke both sides really well. |
**Ryan Bigg:** Thank you. It's like that quote from Lord Of The Rings, if you're gonna ask the elves, they're gonna say "Yes and no." I'm on the side personally of companies should probably allocate at least one, two, three developers to work on open source, and not necessarily full-time, but perhaps a day every two we... |
I think because these open source projects are vital to the work that the companies are doing - it's like you report, the roads and bridges, right? It's the underlying infrastructure to these businesses; if these open source projects didn't exist, these businesses would struggle. If Rails didn't exist, Culture Amp woul... |
\[01:03:14.11\] These are vital parts of the infrastructure, and we do need to spend company's money - and we do need to spend time convincing the people with the money at the companies to contribute developer time to these projects, because they are our infrastructure and it is vital that they are maintained. So that'... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Awesome. Well, I can't think of a better note to end on. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, me neither. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Thanks for coming on, Ryan. |
**Ryan Bigg:** Thank you! |
• Christopher Hiller became a maintainer of Mocha in 2014 after TJ, the previous maintainer, passed control over to him without guidance. |
• The project had a large number of open bugs and features that needed to be added, but initially, the biggest challenge was not technical but rather community-related. |
• Christopher realized he couldn't do everything himself and started reaching out for help, but found it difficult to get contributors on board. |
• A significant turning point came when he spent six months working on a refactor of the core system with little progress, leading him to focus on solving the community problem. |
• He learned through experience and experimentation, without a formal mentorship or guidance, and relied on reading articles and online resources for advice. |
• Maintenance of test frameworks as a challenge due to new frameworks emerging |
• Frustration with attention being drawn away from established frameworks like Mocha |
• Importance of community and brand loyalty in maintaining project popularity |
• Difficulty in managing influx of donations and deciding how to use funds effectively |
• Funding experiments, such as Open Collective, as potential solutions for sustaining open source projects |
• Managing funds from donations and sponsorships |
• Challenges of using money to incentivize contributions |
• Perverse incentives and conflicts that arise when paying contributors |
• Difficulty in finding a sustainable way to fund Mocha development |
• Importance of having a project with internal momentum and willing contributors |
• Challenges of justifying the importance of tools like Mocha to employers or sponsors |
• Open source project growth and sustainability |
• Lessons learned from past projects (Mocha and other examples) |
• Grant funding for open source projects (Mozilla's MOSS program and JS Foundation) |
• Project scope and maintenance: when to consider a project "done" and walking away as maintainer |
• Balancing personal goals with community needs |
• Mocha's toolchain and dependencies are not fully supported on Windows |
• The current scope of Mocha includes test format convention, execution, and reporting |
• Christopher Hiller wants to see a more useful, full-on test runner with better API documentation and a clearer boundary between core functionality and external libraries |
• Burnout and frustration led Christopher Hiller to take a break from the project, but he is now contributing again due to renewed interest from others |
• The project needs dedicated maintainers and contributors to move forward; if that doesn't happen, Christopher Hiller may consider quitting or scaling back his involvement |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Tell us how you got started as a contributor, and then eventually become a maintainer of Mocha? |
**Christopher Hiller:** Well, I actually started as a maintainer. In 2014, when TJ left Mocha and all these other Node projects, he put a call out that said "Hey, I need to have somebody take over my projects. They're up for grabs." I at the time was a user of Mocha and said "Hey, I would like to help. I enjoy using th... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, TJ was sort of unique... Most of his projects really didn't have any other contributors to them. A pull request here or there, but he was really pushing the solo maintainer thing. Express did have a few other people working on it, but most of his projects were literally just him being the only ... |
**Christopher Hiller:** Yeah, Mocha had at least one other person, maybe another couple people at the periphery at the time I joined, but they still weren't that active. So yeah, that's kind of the story, I just joined up. |
I didn't really know what I was getting into. I had contributed to my own projects, I contributed some to Angular UI, which was an early kind of widget toolkit around Angular; it started pre-1.0, so I had done some open source contribution there, but I hadn't really been that involved in open source until Mocha. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It looks like a pretty crazy ramp-up, from being a user to being a maintainer. Did anything get done before contributing to other projects prepare you for what that was gonna be like? |
**Christopher Hiller:** \[03:58\] Yes and no. There are things in my career as a software engineer or what have you... I have learned, for example, how to do a code review and how to receive feedback. I don't view the code I write as an extension of myself; code is code. I wasn't really bashful about sharing it, and I ... |
But as far as dealing with -- I had never dealt with... Again, because of being a software engineer, a lot of companies will kind of insulate you from your user base directly. So if a user of the software you're building has a problem with it or whatever, they contact support and support deals with them. Maybe if the p... |
There were many issues, and I like to think that I learned fairly quickly how to not be a jerk, and be polite about pull requests and stuff. But I certainly made quite a bit of mistakes there; I didn't really know too much about semantic versioning, and that caused some problems. I remember a big one was at some point ... |
I changed the default one from one which is very sparse to one which is more verbose, and we did this in a minor, and a lot of people were really upset about that. I caught a lot of flack for changing the output, not the API, and that was kind of surprising. Since then, I've really tried to drive this home with other c... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So looking back -- it's interesting, you're talking about a lot of the biggest challenges have been kind of community-oriented stuff... When you first took over the project, did you view the biggest challenges as being technical, or being community-related? Did you see a long list of features or bugs... |
**Christopher Hiller:** When I came on we had a lot of open bugs. I looked at those bugs and I said "Oh my gosh, look at this thing; look at the terrible state Mocha is in", and so I wanted to go in and fix them, I felt like that was the highest priority. Well, you go and you start fixing bugs, and you can do that to a... |
So at the time I felt like "Well, there are all these things that need to get fixed and all these features that need to be added", but pretty quickly I realized "Well, I can't do this all myself. I need help", so I started to reach out to basically get more help. |
\[08:14\] Some people that were with the project originally maybe had learned something that I didn't at the time; they had said that Mocha is in maintenance mode. And I was like "Meh... Neah. We've got some features we can add. I think it's a good idea to add these things, because there's a lot of people that want the... |
So at the time no, I didn't think it was a community problem, but I came around and started to see "Well, I just can't do this all myself, as much as I'd like to, and I need help." That kind of started me down the path of looking for ways to keep the project sustainable. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** How long did it take you to figure that out? So you took it over in like 2014-ish... |
**Christopher Hiller:** Yeah, at some point I decided that it would be good, because there were a handful of features that were basically impossible to deliver with the current architecture. I felt like doing a refactoring of the core of the system would be a good idea, and I got some way on that. I was doing it by mys... |
I worked on that refactor for about six months and it didn't really go anywhere. Meanwhile, Mocha was just kind of languishing during that time, so it took me -- I don't know... I wanna say, I was working on the codebase for at least six months, and then this rewrite for another six months after that, and then once I k... |
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