Episode 172: GitHub Maintainer Month 2023 with Sarah Boyce & David Blass

Guests Sarah Boyce | David Blass Panelist Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. This is a special podcast and one of several in this series for GitHub’s Maintainer Month. We’re interviewing actual maintainers of open source code to talk about what they do, how they like it, and what they need to keep going. Today, we’re very excited to have two guests joining us. Our first guest is Sarah Boyce, who’s a Backend Developer at CheMondis and member of Django’s review and triage team. She talks about her role, her contributions to Django, her experiences on the review and triage team, and shares advice for those contemplating becoming a maintainer. Our second guest is David Blass, who’s a full-time JavaScript open source developer and Founder of ArkType, which is a TypeScript validation system. David discusses community feedback, improvements in the new release, the potential monetization of the project, and the TypeScript market and potential for growth of ArkType. Press download to hear more! Sarah: [00:01:13] Sarah tells us about her work with Django, ways it overlaps with her work at CheMondis, and her journey doing open source work and getting involved in Django. [00:03:04] Sarah talks about her contributions to Django and the Python ecosystem, as well as her experiences being on the triage and review team. [00:04:35] We hear about the supportive and friendly community of Django. [00:07:07] Despite being unpaid, Sarah explains how her open source work has helped her gain personal and professional benefits. [00:09:54] We learn how Sarah manages her time effectively with all the extra volunteer work, badminton, painting, and work. [00:11:34] Why Django? Sarah fills us in on why Django was interesting to her. [00:12:26] Sarah tells us what she’s looking forward to, such as meeting other contributors and maintainers of Django. [00:13:26] The hardest thing for Sarah was the anxiety around doing the first jump and rais