# 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.)