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**Nadia Eghbal:** Do you feel like you've learned those types of challenges about being a maintainer on the fly? Was it sort of through experience and realizing when things weren't working, and sort of guessing it would happen next? Did you have any mentorship, or did you read stuff from anyone else to figure that out?... |
**Christopher Hiller:** Well, a lot of it was by the seat of my pants. Different projects demand different types of maintenance, I suppose. Mocha in particular is a project with a very large user base. The code itself is pretty touchy, so I learned to be a very cautious type of maintainer. I didn't have a mentor. I had... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[11:55\] One thing that we've touched on on this podcast before, but we haven't really explored enough is how hard it is competing for people's attention, especially contributors' attention, and I'm just recalling back to 2008 when John Resig first wrote QUnit, one of the things that he kept talking... |
Still to this day, there are just more test frameworks than maybe any other type of library, and there are more people that just decide randomly to write their own test framework, and I'm wondering if that has been a particular challenge with maintaining a test framework, where people just are too willing to go "You kn... |
**Christopher Hiller:** I've definitely experienced some disgruntled users that did not like our decisions, and "I'm gonna write my own blah-blah-blah..." |
**Mikeal Rogers:** We can say Aaron Hammer, it's okay... \[laughter\] He's a good friend, I can call him out. |
**Christopher Hiller:** Actually, I think Lab happened long before I came on, so I was not privy to that discussion. But no, that hasn't really been a thing I've been too worried/concerned about; certainly, there have been some newer frameworks that are gaining steam or have got a lot of interest... I'm not worried tha... |
What's a little bit frustrating is simply the allure of the new thing, and how "Oh, this is a new project. We need maintainers, we need contributions, it's really exciting! Hey, everybody, let's join up! Give me a bunch of GitHub stars and let's do this!" That's been a little frustrating, because I feel like there's a ... |
I would love to find a way to make a project that's already existing -- and maybe this is what I was thinking about with the rewrite, at least in part, was make it new, make it exciting. Some sort of marketing push, a new website, social media - all that stuff. Word of mouth, like "Hey, what's old is new again. Let's c... |
It wasn't until very recently, I think sometime late last year that Mocha actually crossed 10,000 stars, and there are projects that cross 10,000 stars -- this is just like the little silly popularity contest type thing, and there are projects that will cross that within a week if they get on the right website. It's ki... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[16:22\] I think in the npm rankings it's the number one depended upon, right? |
**Christopher Hiller:** Yes, and the number two is Chai, which is the assertion library that a lot of people use with it. But yeah, by a long way Mocha is used by a ton of projects on npm, and even more on just GitHub projects that aren't necessarily published. I never knew any of that before library style, of course. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... I mean, just for reference, there may only be 10,000 stars, but there are over 200,000 downloads in the last day, so it's definitely being used and depended on at a rate much higher than people are sort of saving it on GitHub. |
**Christopher Hiller:** Yeah, and I think that's kind of a criticism that I've heard before, that GitHub stars don't really have anything to do with the actual real-life popularity of a project or the maturity of a project. They're just kind of -- I don't even know what they are. It was cool when we did pass 10,000, bu... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm just thinking out loud a little bit, it's probably a known problem with not just maintaining open source projects - I think it's exacerbated there - but any kind of maintainery duty or infrastructure or anything, even outside of software, that it's really hard to keep people's attention, and I'm t... |
**Christopher Hiller:** What about instead of just a project that you consume, what if that project was also a platform and people could build upon it and make new things all the time? |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That's another way of thinking about it. I don't know if it's possible for every project to be able to do that. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think even when you get into that space -- Node is sort of in that space; there are other libraries, even smaller ones like Browserify, that you would think that at some point they can maybe be done and that everything would just be built on top of them, but it just never really happens. The world ... |
Adam Stacoviak: Up next we're talking about funding experiments. Mocha was asked early on to participate in funding their project on Open Collective, and something unexpected happened. They started getting donations. More donations than they know what to do with. It became a challenge to know what to do with the money ... |
Money tends to complicate things and create conflict, so is money the real solution to sustain open source? If you have money, where does it go? How do you spend it efficiently? We ask these question and more after the break. |
**Break:** \[20:24\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Let's get into some funding experiments that you've gotten involved in. First, why don't you tell me a little bit about Open Collective and what made you wanna try that out as an experiment for getting the funding injected into Mocha? |
**Christopher Hiller:** I hadn't really considered going for funding before Open Collective. I can't recall, but I feel like that team actually approached me, and I can't recall why... But at the time, they hadn't had too much interest, I believe; there may have been a few projects that had what they call "collectives.... |
They talked to me, and I said "Free money? Sure, what could it hurt?" I also thought "Well, if this takes off, maybe it's a really good way to get some more attention around the project." Now, I went into it with no illusions that we were gonna get so many donations that I would be able to quit my job and go work on Mo... |
I felt that sort of thing was more of a means to an end. The end was community, and it wasn't really money per se that the project needed, it was time and attention, and I was hoping that by getting some funds injected into the project, we could use those funds to raise the profile of the project, or that sort of thing... |
\[23:58\] Now, I absolutely don't have any sort of marketing background, I don't know anything about social media; I don't know if I had the money, what would I do with it, and it turned out that not only did I not know what to do, but I didn't even have the time to spend the donations that we had. So it became kind of... |
Our monthly recurring expenses were $14/month before npm decided to give organizations to open source or public projects. They made that free, so now we have no expenses, but we have some money, and I don't really know what to do with it. I would love to figure out a way to maybe send T-shirts, or something, to a confe... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Where did that money come from? Is it from companies, individuals? How did you end up having $12,000/year? |
**Christopher Hiller:** We had like a one-time donation from Yahoo! of $500, I think. We had a one-time donation from [Auth0](https://auth0.com/) and the other thing was SoftLabs has been donating $500/month for quite a while now, so they're kind of Mocha's big sponsor in terms of corporate sponsorship. There aren't an... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That's a lot of people donating $2 or $5/month that adds up to the budget that you have now; it says something about people that love it enough to donate, I guess, right? |
**Christopher Hiller:** Yeah, and there are quite a few of those people. What I wanted to do, and I was so excited when we got our first backer, and I sent out a tweet, I was like "Hey, thanks for backing!", and then the next five people that decided to back us and donate, I sent out tweets. Then there was like 100 peo... |
I don't know if Sean Larkin and Webpack have figured out how to do that. He spends a lot of time on Twitter, but you know... That doesn't scale. I would love to be able to do that, but I haven't found out a good way to do that yet that works for me. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, there's definitely a scale issue there. \[laughter\] I raised a very tiny amount of money in Git Bounty, or Bounty Source, or one of those back in the day, and I think the money is just still sitting there, because the Request project just could never figure out what to do with it; we've really... |
**Christopher Hiller:** \[28:04\] Yeah, we tried that, and there were a couple things that needed to happen, to get done. There was myself and a couple other maintainers; we worked on these tasks and build for it, and we had kind of decided, "Okay, we're gonna work on these and build for these. You do this, and I do th... |
That was kind of strange, and I thought "If I'm not having fun, why am I here? And if I can't make money doing thing that are fun, what's the point?" But the point is that people are gonna have different ideas about what is worth actual money. Money tends to complicate things. Who is to say that if I do some task and b... |
I'm not sure how -- I know Webpack has an idea of how to spend their funds; I haven't look too deeply into it, but I know it didn't work out well for us, and we had actually received advice from some other projects that says "You just wanna keep money out of the development, and use it for things like recurring expense... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I spoke with Sean a little while ago and one of the things that he said was that he focuses on things that nobody else wants to do because of this particular problem, but at the same time Sean has a full-time job and he's doing like 20 hours a week of work that nobody else wants to do on Webpac... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Something I think has been a recurring theme this season too, thinking about if you have money, where does the money go and how do you spend it efficiently, and for both of your stories -- you know, a small amount of money can be really awkward amounts of money, because what do you do with that? A big... |
The examples I've seen that have been successful are where the project itself can be sustainable in the sense of money is not coming in and out of the project - beyond, like you said, recurring expenses - but it's more about if someone already internally wants to work on the project and is able to find time, whether it... |
**Christopher Hiller:** \[32:26\] Well, I have a full-time job as well, so working on Mocha in any regular capacity is just kind of beyond me right now; I'm not able to do it, and of course, I tried, but I burned out. So if I was going to do that, it would need to be through an employer, but I have yet to have an emplo... |
It's a tough one, because Mocha is part of the test stack, so number one, your product manager or what have you is not going to care too much about what that test stack looks like, and is only going to really care if the software is quality. So basically, we're gonna leave the testing up to the developers, and that's t... |
It's really hard for developers to get visibility for these types of tools that they use, and justify to employers that "Yes, this tool we use is very important." There are other tools, like maybe a Webpack, that help build production websites, and that's big. That's something that they can kind of wrap their head arou... |
So it's kind of tough to just -- I can't even pitch it to my employer that I should spend time working on this thing, because I can't justify it to myself... Like, "Yeah, this project needs help, but it really has nothing to do with the business goals." It's just all about "Yeah, we want quality, so write the tests", b... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** If you were starting all over again and you had to think about -- or let's just say even if you were TJ and you were trying to figure out where this project goes long-term, is there anything that could have been done differently, or is this just sort of the inevitable way that projects unfold? |
**Christopher Hiller:** I don't wanna blame TJ, because it's not really his fault... If we as the open source community had known in 2011 (or whenever he wrote this) what we know now about how to grow and sustain a project, sure he would have done things differently. Why wouldn't he? |
If I was going to start over and do it again, sure, I would do it differently. I would make things much more friendly to contributors; I would work a little harder on documentation. We would maybe have chat rooms, forums, all sorts of other things that weren't really part of the idea. |
\[36:16\] I think Mocha was another project where a developer decided to scratch their own itch and make a tool that was useful for them. I don't know if he envisioned that it would get as large as it has - large in terms of the userbase - but yeah, definitely things would have been done differently if it was starting ... |
Actually, just today I merged a code of conduct for Mocha, and that was a long time coming. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Nice! |
**Christopher Hiller:** I can't remember who it was, but somebody sent a PR, and yeah. |
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