Episode 101: Nicholas Zakas and ESLint

Guest Nicholas C. Zakas Panelists Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. You may know my guest today, Nicholas Zakas, because he is the creator of a very popular JavaScript project called ESLint, which has been downloaded 13 million times each week. Nicholas is an independent software engineer, consultant, and coach, and has written numerous books including, Understanding ECMAScript 6, The Principles of Object-Oriented JavaScript, and Maintainable JavaScript. With over sixteen years of web application development experience and speaking at conferences around the world, he’s putting his focus now on mentoring and coaching the next generation of JavaScript engineers. Nicholas brings us on his journey sharing his story of becoming a developer, starting ESLint, and what he’s doing to make sure everybody in the ESLint community is able to benefit from the money they are bringing in. We also learn more about an interesting blog post he wrote, how contributors get paid, and other open source projects ESLint donates to. Why should you use ESLint? Go ahead and download this episode now to find out! [00:01:39] Nicholas shares his story with us starting out as a developer and how it led him to starting ESLint. [00:03:01] What did Nicholas mean when he said he fell in love with JavaScript? [00:03:47] We find out how long ESLint has been around, how many people are working full-time, and how he keeps himself in funds. [00:05:04] Nicholas talks about the Open Collective and GitHub sponsors they set up for donations. [00:07:42] Richard brings up a blog post Nicholas wrote on, “How to talk to your company about sponsoring an open source project” and he tells us what iterations he’s gone through with ESLint. [00:10:59] Nicholas talks about the difficulties in multi-tasking, and he tells us the next thing they tried with paying a straight per hour rate for team members. [00:17:15] Richard wonders where Nicholas came up with the less