On today's episode, Sarah Dayan discusses open source sustainability with Nicholas Zakas, creator of ESLint. ESLint is a widely popular JavaScript linter with a giant ecosystem of third-party plugins. If you have a JavaScript project with a continuous integration, you are certainly using ESLint and you do not want it to fail. Nicholas is also a seasoned author who wrote several books about JavaScript since the early 2000s and more blog posts that you can probably afford to read.
A recurring meme is that all modern digital infrastructure somehow depends on a project that some random person has been thanklessly maintaining for decades. Sustaining open source projects that support countless enterprise products has been a particularly hot topic in tech for the last couple of years.
- How do you actively maintain a project that others rely on but doesn’t bring revenue?
- How do you deal with stress and fatigue?
- Is the promise of open source still holding?
