Awesome Maintainers

Talks, blog posts, and interviews about the experience of being an open source maintainer

• @alyssais, Homebrew
  • "Why I helped maintain Homebrew" (video)
• @amjith, pgcli
  • "Maintainer Stories: Amjith Ramanujam" (video)
• @antirez, Redis
  • "The struggles of an open source maintainer" (post)
• @ariya, PhantomJS
  • "Maintainer Stories: Ariya Hidayat" (interview)
• @ashfurrow, Moya
  • "Building Open Source Communities" (slides)
• @bbatsov, Rubocop
  • "Interview with Bozhidar Batsov: The Creator’s Thoughts on RuboCop and the Ruby Style Guide" (post)
• @boneskull, Mocha
  • "Maintaining a Popular Project and Managing Burnout" (interview)
• @brettcannon, Python
  • "The give and take of open source" (video)
  • "Maintainer Stories: Brett Cannon" (interview)
  • "Setting expectations for open source participation" (post)
  • "Why I took October off from OSS volunteering" (post)
• @brianc, node-postgres
  • "Creating and maintaining node-postgres solo" (interview)
• @BurntSushi, Rust libraries
  • "My FOSS Story" (post)
• @ceejbot, Entropic, npm
  • "The economics of open source" (video, post)
• @colcarroll, PyMC3
  • "Two Years of Open Source" (slides/post)
• @ctb & @mr-c, khmer
  • "Channeling Community Contributions to Scientific Software: A Sprint Experience" (paper)
  • "Walking the Talk: Adopting and Adapting Sustainable Scientific Software Development processes in a Small Biology Lab" (paper)
• @danielbachhuber, wp-cli
  • "Experiments and the Economics of Open Source" (interview)
  • "My condolences, you're now the maintainer of a popular open source project" (video, post)
• @danvet, Linux drm-intel
  • "Maintainers Don't Scale" (video, slides, post)
  • "Burning Down the Castle" (video, post)
• @dhh, Rails
  • "Open source beyond the market" (video, post)
• @dominictarr, scuttlebot and others
  • "Statement on event-stream compromise" (post)
• @emilyemorehouse, Python
  • "My Path to Becoming a Python Core Developer" (video)
• @ericholscher, Read the Docs
  • "Maintainer Stories: Eric Holscher" (video)
  • "The post I never published" (post)
• @evancz, Elm
  • "The Hard Parts of Open Source" (video, slides)
  • "On Storytelling" (video)
• @fat, Bootstrap
  • "What is open source and why do I feel so guilty?" (video, slides)
• @fatih, vim-go
  • "Taking an indefinite sabbatical from my projects" (post)
• @feross, WebTorrent
  • "Recap of the funding experiment" (post)
  • "What I learned from WebTorrent: Lessons learned from starting and running a P2P open source project" (slides)
• @fijal, PyPy
  • "Open source funding" (video)
• @FooBarWidget & @prototype, Phusion Passenger
  • "Bootstrapping a business around open source" (video)
  • "Maintaining Passenger" (video)
• @freakboy3742, PyBee
  • "Maintainer Stories: Russell Keith-Magee" (interview)
• @gaearon, React, Redux
  • "Maintaining Open Source Projects: Dan Abramov" (interview)
• @hzoo, Babel
  • "(Open) source of anxiety" (post)
  • "Through the Open Source Looking Glass" (video, slides)
  • "Maintainer, heal thyself" (video, slides)
  • "Maintainer Stories: Henry Zhu" (interview)
  • "Maintaining an OSS project" (video, slides)
• @indexzero, winston
  • "Keeping Important Code Alive" (slides)
  • "Modernizing winston for node@4" (video, slides)
• @jacobian, Django
  • "What Part of '... for Life' Don't You Understand?" (video)
• @janl, CouchDB
  • "Sustainable Open Source: The Maintainers Perspective or: How I Learned to Stop Caring and Love Open Source" (post)
• @jeresig, jQuery
  • "Walking Away From Your Open Source Project: John Resig" (interview)
• @jessfraz, Kubernetes
  • "Maintainer Stories: Jess Frazelle (interview)
• @jodosha, Hanami
  • "Lessons Learned While Building Hanami" (video, slides)
• @kelset, React Native
  • "All Hands on Deck: The React Native Community Experience" (video, slides)
• @kennethreitz, requests
  • "The Reality of Developer Burnout" (post)
• @kentcdodds, various
  • "The First Pull Request" (video, slides)
  • "First-time Contributors and Maintainer Balance" (podcast)
  • "Managing an Open Source Project" (video, slides)
  • "Open Sourcing Your Stuff" (video, slides)
• @KrauseFx, fastlane
  • "Scaling open source communities" (post)
• @kris-nova, kubernetes-kops
  • "Maintainer Stories: Kris Nova" (interview)
• @Krzysztof-Cieslak, Ionide
  • "OSS and Community: The Story" (post)
• @kytrinyx, Exercism
  • "Maintainer Stories: Katrina Owen" (video)
• @lmccart, p5.js
  • "Design, Software, and Open Source" (interview)
• @mikeal, request
  • "Request's Past, Present and Future" (post)
• @MikeMcQuaid, Homebrew
  • "Research Study Interview: The Work of Maintaining Open Source Software" (post)
  • "The Open Source Contributor Funnel" (post, video, slides)
• @mlavin, Django
  • "Maintaining Your Sanity While Maintaining Your Open Source App" (video)
• @mpdehaan, Ansible, SourceOptics
  • "Michael DeHaan on creating Ansible and SourceOptics" (interview)
• @mxcl, Homebrew
  • "Making Homebrew: The Genesis and Growth of a Global Open Source Project" (video)
• @nathanmarz, Apache Storm
  • "History of Apache Storm and lessons learned" (post)
• @nolanlawson, PouchDB
  • "What it feels like to be an open-source maintainer" (post)
• @pgbovine, Python Tutor
  • "Python Tutor Software Development Philosophy" (video)
  • "Ten years and nearly ten million users: my experience being a solo maintainer of open-source software in academia" (post)
• @Schneems, Sprockets, CodeTriage
  • "Saving Sprockets - What happens when a maintainer leaves" (video, post with transcript)
• @sebmck, Babel
  • "~2015 in review" (post)
• @Seldaek, Composer
  • "Behind the Scenes of Maintaining an Open Source Project" (video)
• @sindresorhus, AVA, awesome
  • "Between the Wires: An interview with open source developer Sindre Sorhus" (interview)
• @steveklabnik, Ruby on Rails
  • "How to be an open source gardener" (post)
• @stewartsmith, Skiboot
  • "Organizational Change: Challenges in shipping open source firmware" (video)
• @stuarthalloway, Clojure
  • "Stewardship Made Practical" (video)
• @tbrisker, Foreman
  • "On maintaining Foreman" (video)
• @tgamblin, Spack
  • "Open Source and Supercomputers (Spack)" (interview)
• @timgraham, Django
  • "Maintainer Stories: Tim Graham" (interview)
• @Trott, slug
  • "Slugging It Out In Open Source" (audio, transcript)
• @vjeux, React Native, Prettier
  • "Being Successful at Open Source" (video)
• @withoutboats, Rust
  • "Organizational Debt" (post)
• @yyx990803, Vue.js
  • "Crowdfunding Open Source (Vue.js)" (interview)
  • "Maintainer Stories: Evan You" (interview)
  • "The Journey to Full Time Open Source" (video)

Contributing

Additional suggestions are welcomed! Check out CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

(NOTE: If you're a maintainer listed on here who would like to be removed, just open an issue or email me privately.)

License and attribution

This list is available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 License, meaning you are free to use it for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, without any attribution back to me (public domain). (If you ever want to reference me, find me here! @nayafia But you are in no way required to do so.)