Plight of package maintenance
y-a-v-a opened this issue · comments
Plight of package maintenance
How can our community overcome suicide by lack of package updates?
I like to expose creative stuff made with NodeJS on the internet, even if that means that I have to learn C++. Last spring I decided, after being an npm guzzler mostly, to opt for being maintainer for an npm package: node-gd.
Since I hopped on the bus of maintainership, I learned a lot in a short timespan: I've consulted the NodeJS Addons documentation page frequently, I've searched Github for implementation examples, discovered the value of Native Abstractions for Node.js (nan), had internal discussions on which node versions to support, learned the basics of C++ and learned how to overcome external library installation differences. And I'm still not satisfied with my efforts up until now, as I have many ideas on how the package can be improved. I feel the urge to continue: do one thing and do it well!
In my talk I will touch upon lessons learned, how to manage user expectations, the virtues of maintainership and practical necessities concerning dedication, infrastructure, writing documentation and promoting your package. Although Robert L. Glass's software maintainers virtues are still mostly applicable, they are, in my opinion, too negative. I will propose a new declaration of maintainer virtues in the hope that we as developers, will keep up maintenance of our myriad of produced npm packages. The optimistic finale being that I hope our community will not commit suicide by lack of updates.
Bio
Originally schooled as visual artist, I am working as frontend developer for about 10 year now, currently at a Dutch clothing company. In my spare time I create image manipulators, Twitter bots, websites as art works and maintain the npm package node-gd.