Nick and Mikeal catch up with Henry Zhu, the maintainer of Babel and host of the Maintainers Anonymous and Hope in Source podcasts. We discuss his path to open source maintainer-ship. We also chat about best practices for interacting with maintainers, while remembering that people are behind open source, and we talk self-care and avoiding burnout, culminating in a self-care repo being created to gather and discuss tips to care for yourself.

Discuss on Changelog News

Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors

• Rollbar – We move fast and fix things because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes. Deploy with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog.
• Algolia – Our search partner. Algolia’s full suite search APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences across all platforms and devices. We’re using Algolia to power our site search here at Changelog.com. Get started for free and learn more at algolia.com.
• Gauge – Low maintenance test automation! Gauge is free and open source test automation framework that takes the pain out of acceptance testing. Less code, less maintenance, more acceptance testing. Gauge is a free and open source test automation framework that takes the pain out of acceptance testing. Gauge tests are in Markdown which makes writing and maintaining tests easier.
• GitPrime – Download GitPrime’s 20 Patterns book, a field guide to help engineering managers recognize achievement, spot bottlenecks, and debug development processes with data.

Featuring

• Henry Zhu – Twitter, GitHub, Website
• Nick Nisi – Twitter, GitHub, Website
• Mikeal Rogers – Twitter, GitHub

Notes and Links

• Hope in Source
• Maintainers Anonymous
• The GitHub Revolution: Why We’re All in Open Source Now
• Open Collective
• Introducing draft pull requests
• Atomic Habits by James Clear
• Mikeal’s self-care repository
• Henry’s Patreon

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!