Episode 77: Jordan Harband: Being a Sustainable Maintainer of Hundreds of Projects

Guest Jordan Harband Panelists Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Alyssa
Wright | Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain!
We are all very excited to have as our guest today, Jordan Harband,
referred to as “Mr. Perfect” by the panelists! He is a longtime
open source enthusiast, maintainer, coder, works at Coinbase, a
TC39 Delegate, and heavily involved with Node for years. Today,
Jordan gives us his perspective of being a maintainer of
repositories and code. We find out how he is so successful at being
a maintainer of so many open source projects, how he deals with
ethics, how to ethically license your stuff, and how he handles
hundreds of repos which he helps maintain. Jordan tells us what
he’s doing to help other people out and shares some tips to a path
if you’re interested in becoming more experienced. Download this
episode now to find out much more and to get some fresh
inspiration! [00:01:39] Jordan tells us how he got started with
Node. [00:03:42] Justin wonders how Jordan maintains all of his
notifications that he has and how does he deal with it. Also, he
tells us if sponsorship plays a part of him having that passion and
not getting overwhelmed which is why he’s so successful. [00:09:23]
Jordan explains how he is nowhere close enough in terms of revenue
stream from sponsorships to be able to consider quitting a job and
working full-time on open source. [00:11:34] Richard brings up a
book called, Drive by Daniel Pink, and wonders how Jordan chooses
which open source projects to invest in and how does he feel like
they’re actually giving him value because you’re making something
that’s meaningful to you. [00:14:06] Justin asks Jordan if IE6 will
ever die. [00:16:32] Jordan explains how to deal with ethics and
open source, and how to ethically license your stuff. Richard
wonders what he thinks the ethical obligations are of the
maintainer who has a package. [00:20:29] Richard wonders since
Jordan has hundreds of repos which he helps maintain, and how he
deals with deciding to take on more work. [00:21:35] We find out
what Jordan’s involvement is with the Airbnb JavaScript Style
Guide. [00:24:08] Jordan shares advice to somebody who is just
starting out in open source looking to build in a sustainable way
for themselves and for the code they’re making. [00:27:05] Eric
asks Jordan if he ever considered setting up a counselling program
for open source maintainers since he seems to have it all figured
out. Also, Jordan shares when he had a challenging moment in his
life. [00:32:33] Richard wonders if Jordan is doing anything to
systematically change open source to make sure that other people
also have the opportunities to work on open source if they want to,
he shares what he is doing, and mentions one of the programs he’s
involved with called Major League Hacking. [00:36:37] Find out
where you can follow Jordan along with his “perfectness.” Quotes
[00:04:05] “I try to treat those notifications in an asynchronous
manner so that I’m not, like I don’t have any push notifications
set up for those things, so it’s not bothering me when I’m doing
something else, whether that’s doing coding or other work, or
whether that’s spending time with family or friends.” [00:06:14]
“None of the parts of my career have been specifically for my open
source projects.” [00:07:01] “The rise of sponsorship models,
Tidelift, Open Collective, GitHub sponsors, etc.., what that does
to me is it’s a demonstration of interest and appreciation in a way
that is more concrete than someone clicking a GitHub emoji, giving
me kinda invisible internet points. It’s something concrete.”
[00:08:02] “The ability of someone to contribute even a dollar,
five dollars a month is a concrete gesture that for the majority of
people is actually really significant.” [00:08:12] “There’s that
whole concept of how, when a very wealthy person will donate a
large amount of money to a charitable cause and then a number of
people point out that in terms of the percentage of their net
worth, it’s actually like you giving three dollars, and it’s still
meaningful because it’s three hundred million dollars, but it’s
much more significant I think when an individual gives sixty
dollars a year, which is like my lowest tier on GitHub sponsors is
five dollars, so if somebody is paying sixty dollars a year for
most people that’s something, that’s significant.” [00:09:53] “It’s
not life changing, as I said, in the sense of paying my bills or
not, but it would be life changing in a sense that I would be able
to consider, well, I love my job, but do I love my job more than I
would love working full-time on open source.” [00:13:46] “So there
is a trade-off there, but the upside is that ninety-eight of those
packages need three minutes of maintenance every five years.”
[00:14:30] “But I think there are a lot of engineers that are
frustrated supporting old environments, old Node versions, or old
browsers, and it sort of violates a sense of aesthetics to have to
deal with that messiness.” [00:14:59] “And whenever people talk
about dropping browser support they talk about percentages, but
.01% of internet users is like the population of this country or
something like that, I don’t know, I haven’t done the math. I’m
probably off by a factor of ten or a hundred or something, but it’s
still a significant number of human beings.” [00:24:27] “One is
remember that code is not the only important thing. Even just
updating docs and READMEs and tutorials and things on projects is
immensely valuable, and you don’t have to have any expertise in
programming, necessarily, to be able to do that. So, there’s lots
of ways you can get familiar with a project without touching any
code at all.” [00:26:50] “And so, in the same way I think that for
oneself, knowing your own behavior patterns and what is a good fit
for you and what works well for your life and your mental health
and so on, is probably the most effective tool to making sure that
happens.” Spotlight [00:37:23] Eric’s spotlight is a GitHub project
called the README project. [00:37:59] Justin’ spotlight is a funny
woman on Twitter called Alexis Gay, who does hilarious Bay area
tweets. [00:38:37] Alyssa’s spotlights are acknowledging one year
of COVID lockdown, LISTSERV, and watching Coming 2 America.
[00:39:20] Richard’s spotlight is a book by Daniel Pink called
Drive. [00:39:38] Jordan’s spotlight is Tidelift. Links Jordan
Harband Twitter (https://twitter.com/ljharb?lang=en) Jordan Harband
Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ljharb/) Jordan Harband
GitHub (https://github.com/ljharb) Coinbase
(https://www.coinbase.com/) Tidelift- How Jordan Harband maintains
hundreds of npm packages
(https://blog.tidelift.com/how-jordan-harband-maintains-hundreds-of-npm-packages)
globalThis-ECMAScript Proposal-GitHib
(https://github.com/tc39/proposal-global) MLH-Major League Hacking
(https://mlh.io/) Airbnb JavaScript Style Guide
(https://github.com/airbnb/javascript) The ReadME
Project-Maintaining kindness and commits by Jordan Harband
(https://github.com/readme/jordan-harband) Alexis Gay-Twitter
(video)
(https://twitter.com/yayalexisgay/status/1369346460911734784)
LISTSERV (http://www.lsoft.com/products/listserv.asp) Coming 2
America (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6802400/) [Drive: The
Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H.
Pink](https://www.amazon.com/Drive-Surprising-Truth-About-Motivates/dp/1594484805/ref=sr14?dchild=1&keywords=daniel+pink&qid=1615855737&sr=8-4)
Tidelift (https://tidelift.com/) Sustain (https://sustainoss.org/)
Credits Produced by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/)
Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound
(https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at
Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guest:
Jordan Harband.