known as @hacdias
Last month was Maintainer Month, a month were open source software maintainers are celebrated. A lot of the software in the world - and thus society itself - runs on open source software, which is something not known to a lot of people. During this past month, I read a few posts here and there about people sharing their journey and experience as an open source maintainer, and today I wanted to give my take on it.
This past weekend I went to Brussels for FOSDEM with Sebastiaan, who has already written a bit about it. FOSDEM, if you don’t know, is the largest open source software conference in Europe - or in the world, not sure. This was not my first time attending, but it was positively chaotic as usual.
In July 2017, something unexpected happened: I opened the trending page on the GitHub interface, under the Go language and saw my own project there. File Browser - then still called File Manager -, was trending in first place under the Go language!
At the time, that allowed the project to go from around 200 stars to over 700 during that week. Nowadays, this project I started long ago has over 22k GitHub stars ⭐️. Despite no longer maintaining it, I’m grateful to the current maintainers for continuing the project.
For some, it may come as a surprise that my website’s source code is not open-source. That hasn’t, however, always been the case. Before I fully switching to my custom CMS - named Eagle -, it did use to be open-source.
During the past week and a half, I have been slowly, but surely, doing some cleanup of my GitHub repositories. In the process, I finally decided to tick off some of the items from my list, such as using vanity Go import URLs, improving my IndieAuth library, as well as releasing a Micropub package.
