Henry Zhu Chats With Kent About The Responsibilities Of A Maintainer

Chats with Kent C. Dodds

Henry Zhu's transition from a programing role to a more managerial role as Babel's maintainer has been hard. As programmers, we tend to value our work based on the number of commits or pushing features. When you are a manager, you're not writing much code anymore.

There's still an expectation that maintainers should be writing code. Still, maintainers also have to triage and merge things, release process, onboard, market, write documentation, test, make videos, and give talks. Because of all this, a maintainer's time is best spent figuring out how to get more people involved with a project.

To get people interested, the maintainer has to do the job of showing people what's possible. You have to be involved in the community, and you have to like it. At a fundamental level, open-source is about service, serving other people in the community, giving back, and not expecting anything in return.

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Homework

• Without writing code, do one thing to contribute to open source!

Resources

• All Contributors
• Source
• Maintainers Anonymous
• Chesterton's fence

Guest: Henry Zhu

• Twitter: @left_pad
• GitHub: @hzoo

Host: Kent C. Dodds

• Website: kentcdodds.com
• Twitter: @kentcdodds
• GitHub: @kentcdodds
• YouTube: Kent C. Dodds
• Epic React: epicreact.dev