Nick and Mikeal catch up with Henry Zhu, the maintainer of Babel and host of the Maintainers Anonymous and Hope in Source podcasts. We discuss his path to open source maintainer-ship. We also chat about best practices for interacting with maintainers, while remembering that people are behind open source, and we talk self-care and avoiding burnout, culminating in a self-care repo being created to gather and discuss tips to care for yourself.

Our friend Henry Zhu (of Babel “fame”) has a new podcast all about maintainers:

How can we work together to achieve a common goal: whether in our code, cities, or infrastructure? Henry Zhu chats with fellow maintainers across all disciplines of life on their process, motivations, and struggles as they learn in public.

This is a short 15 minute talk from Henry Zhu at All Things Open, who just announced their photos and videos from their 2018 conference. In this talk Henry asks:

When we think about open source, we think about code. Is it more than that?

What do you think? What is open source to you?

After almost 2 years, 4k commits, over 50 pre-releases, and a lot of help we are excited to announce the release of Babel 7. It’s been almost 3 years since the release of Babel 6! There’s a lot of moving parts so please bear with us in the first weeks of release.

Babel’s role in the JavaScript ecosystem…

Babel is fundamental to JavaScript development today. There are currently over 1.3 million dependent repos on GitHub, 17 million downloads on npm per month, and hundreds of users including many major frameworks (React, Vue, Ember, Polymer), and companies (Facebook, Netflix, Airbnb). It has become such a foundation for JavaScript development that many people don’t even know that it is being used. Even if you aren’t using it yourself, it’s highly likely your dependencies are using Babel.

Adam is on location at ZEIT Day talking with Jessica Rose about burnout, Henry Zhu about his passions and pursuit of open source, and Simon Willison about data and his passion for interesting datasets in the world.

I wasn’t ready to become the maintainer of Babel. After all, I had never published my own npm package or explored much of the codebase. But slowly (sometimes really slowly) I got used to it. I recall Kent C. Dodds saying that if you want to be a maintainer, just act like and do the things a maintainers does.

Sounds easy enough 🤣. I particularly enjoyed the linked post on imposter syndrome from Rachel Smith.

In this episode Michael Jackson talks with Henry Zhu, maintainer of the hugely popular Babel project, about open source sustainability and what’s coming next for the Babel project.

Henry Zhu joined Nadia and Mikeal to discuss his work on Babel, how he became and accidental maintainer, why he thinks maintainers aren’t special, paid open source work, the Babel brand, and building community.

Check the feed, there are three new episodes of Request For Commits out there for you!!