Notices by Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe), page 34

It seems the publishing industry has reached a point where they're so cash-strapped and so beleaguered by ad fraud, that they feel they have to run a ton of code to:

- fingerprint you
- detect ad-stacking and other scams
- detect how long or if the user has looked at the ad

… all of which leads to the familiar "I just loaded a news article, why is my fan spinning?"

If you're already chewing up the user's CPU to try to make money, cryptocurrency miners sorta feel like the logical conclusion.

Refresh to enjoy Mastodon v2.2.0. 😊 Release notes: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/releases/tag/v2.2.0

Cool, MDN publishes their browser compat data as an npm package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/mdn-browser-compat-data

There's even a proof-of-concept :firefox: extension showing how you could use it to gauge the cross-browser compatibility of a given page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/compat-report/

So I checked in on an old IndexedDB benchmark of mine, and it appears that Chrome actually blocks the main thread even when you're calling IndexedDB from inside of a web worker? This is really mind-boggling behavior: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=536620#c27

Woot, Firefox 58 adds support for PWAs on Android! I can finally get fullscreen Mastodon when adding it to my homescreen :blobaww: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/01/23/latest-firefox-quantum-release-now-available-with-new-features/

Forgot to post about this, but I wrote a little script to back up a Mastodon instance, in case anyone finds it useful. 🙂 #MastoAdmins https://gist.github.com/nolanlawson/668abcf9f5e8ef4659e132a32525e50c

Open-source software can be a huge mental burden on those who write it, but it also adds some incredible beauty and value to the world. It's a rare kind of software that tends to be an expression of someone's passion rather than the goals of some corporation or organization. Let's make sure there's more of it in the world.

To conclude this thread: please don't treat open-source maintainers as the goose who laid the golden egg. They don't owe you anything. If they tell you it's too much work to maintain some piece of functionality, either offer to maintain it yourself or support them in their decision.

Here are some other great talks/posts on the subject of open-source guilt and maintainer burnout:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIDb6VBO9os
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqcuzSwySR4
- https://www.michaelbromley.co.uk/blog/why-i-havent-fixed-your-issue-yet/
- http://thejameskyle.com/dear-javascript.html

I also got some follow-up posts from other folks in the community, trying to give me advice on how not to burn out:

- https://medium.com/@mikeal/time-to-leave-a68294ccb2af
- http://writing.jan.io/2017/03/06/sustainable-open-source-the-maintainers-perspective-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-caring-and-love-open-source.html

Ultimately, I followed Mikeal's advice and left the project. I was too burned out by that point.

In short, I wish more people had empathy for open-source maintainers and tried to understand things from their point of view. I wrote this post to try to articulate my own feelings as I began to spiral towards my own burnout: https://nolanlawson.com/2017/03/05/what-it-feels-like-to-be-an-open-source-maintainer/

After I wrote that post, I was contacted by dozens of open-source maintainers who told me I captured exactly how they felt. So hopefully it stands as a good insight for anyone trying to understand the mind of an open-source maintainer.

Being an open-source maintainer is really hard. A lot of people tend to act very entitled towards you, as if you "owe" them your time or your attention.

It's totally illogical: you put something out there for free, and now because of that, folks feel like they deserve more of it! And yet this is often the prevailing mood in OSS communities.

At the same time, you may start to believe this logic yourself, leading to "open-source guilt." This often ends in burnout.