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Henry Zhu

A steward of @babeljs 🤗. @Behance. Soli Deo Gloria

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JS Party JS Party #74

When in doubt, log an issue

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.

Henry Zhu babeljs.io

Babel 7 released

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.

Henry Zhu DEV.to

I wasn't ready to become the maintainer of Babel

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.

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