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Video: Maintaining a Library and a Community

Mark Erikson
Mark Erikson
Replay.io

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Anyone can publish a library to NPM. But what happens when that library is used by millions of developers? How do you juggle the complexities of publishing one of the most widely used packages in the ecosystem, and also deal with supporting and maintaining a community?

We'll look at the mindset and and approach to dealing with these challenges and what it means to be a "maintainer" today, including practices for providing user support across platforms, keeping a "devrel" mindset, designing documentation, designing features and APIs, how to consider package versioning and compatibility, when to ship breaking changes, technical challenges with publishing packages, and keeping up with the ever-evolving ecosystem.

This talk has been presented at React Summit US 2024, check out the latest edition of this React Conference.

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Video summary
Today's talk is about what it's like to be an open-source library maintainer, with examples and suggestions from the speaker's experience. Maintainers have various roles and responsibilities, including providing support for users and managing documentation. Setting boundaries, prioritizing documentation, and designing APIs are important aspects of being a maintainer. Release management and compatibility are challenging, requiring careful consideration of patch releases and breaking changes. The speaker shares an example of marking a method as deprecated in Redux and providing a migration path for users. Compensation for maintainers is a debated topic, and code mods can help with code migration. Maintainers often face challenges but can have a significant impact on the ecosystem and people's careers. Supporting open source developers is greatly appreciated.

FAQ

Marc Erikson is a front-end engineer at Replay, where they are building a time-traveling debugger for JavaScript.

Open-source maintainers handle various responsibilities including community management, tech support, documentation, and ensuring the library meets users' needs, beyond just writing code.

Marc Erikson approaches breaking changes in Redux cautiously, aiming to minimize user disruption and providing comprehensive migration guides to ease transitions.

When designing an open-source library API, it's important to consider user goals, the necessity of features, and potential usage patterns that might not have been initially anticipated.

Marc Erikson handles support for Redux users through GitHub issues and discussions, a Discord channel, and by answering questions on Reddit, Hacker News, and other platforms.

Versioning in open-source libraries helps manage user expectations, with patch releases expected to be safe updates and major versions potentially requiring migration efforts.

Documentation is crucial for open-source libraries as it helps users understand features, use cases, and the library's capabilities, effectively acting as a guide for new and existing users.

JS code shift and other tools specifically designed for code mods are recommended for creating automated scripts to assist users in migrating to new major versions.

Marc Erikson is a front-end engineer at Replay, a Redux maintainer, and a developer on the React team for over 10 years.

The focus of Marc Erikson's talk is to give app developers insights into open-source library maintenance, provide examples, and share lessons learned from years of experience.

Mark Erikson
Mark Erikson
29 min
19 Nov, 2024

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