Last week I had the privilege of joining Abby Cabunoc Mayes as a guest host for an episode of GitHub’s Open Source Friday where we spoke to Mitchell Hashimoto about Vouch and this “Eternal September” of open source. Around 43:15 as we were talking about our humanity as maintainers and how our own behaviors have changed, I said something about “the joy of being a maintainer” as a quip but now I’m realizing it isn’t just a quip!

When I decided to stop working on WordPress full-time, it was in fact because I had lost the joy – amazing things were happening, but instead of feeling excited to bring up other developers and contributors, I felt resentful. Something had gotten lost, and while I’m glad I realized it and made a change for myself, I have found myself once again working on quality of life for OSS maintainers at GitHub. And in that work, what we want to do is find ways to bring back that joy… or at least try to reduce the things that get in the way of it.

So what constitutes the joy of being a maintainer? For me that’s:

• Seeing a new handle (username) start showing up consistently and not just with code
• Really, any consistent non-code contribution, especially if you triage bugs and/or write clear reproduction steps
• Meeting people IRL after working with them a bunch as said handles, especially at WordPress Contributor Days
• Watching a contributor find an area they’re really excited about and build confidence and leadership in it
• Having built up so much knowledge I can debug weird things really quickly
• When I can’t debug quickly, still managing to puzzle out a problem, especially the really gnarly ones
• Giving a contributor a half-baked idea and watching them run away with it better than I could have
• Blaming a bit of code and finding out that something complicated has been sitting there working for the last 20 years
• Blaming a bit of code and discovering that past me was smart, actually (I also find that past me was an idiot about as often)
• Watching the WordPress download counter reset and skyrocket when a new release goes out – it used to take days to get to one million; now it’s on the order of an hour thanks to scale and autoupdates

I’m sure there’s more, but for now: back to work on making things better for maintainers everywhere, not just through defense mechanisms and reacting to AI and poor etiquette, but by making space for what brings you joy ❤️