We need more open-source love

September 12th, 2016

The news that Tim Wood, maintainer of popular JavaScript library Moment.js, was stepping away from the project was a wake-up call for the open-source community. His reasons, although super easy to understand and relate to, are not discussed often enough.

Seeing bugs and issues continue to roll in and being mentally unable to address them has led to feelings of failure and depression. When looking at the moment project, I could only see the negatives. The bugs and misnomers and mistakes I had made. It let to a cycle of being too depressed to contribute, which led to being depressed because I wasn’t contributing.

Many developers came forward to speak about the issue, like Dave DeSandro, the man behind projects like Isotope and Flickity.

I completely relate to this. On a much smaller scale, I've dedicated huge amounts of my personal time to projects like include-media and Staticman, and yet the vast majority of feedback I ever get from anyone are bug reports or feature requests (luckily, I never had to deal with this level of harshness).

Instead of only coming across the negative comments, I would love to hear from people that use these projects successfully and to learn about how they helped make their jobs and lives a tiny bit easier. Their experiences would certainly teach me a lot about my own projects and the positive feedback would be a huge motivation boost to help me keep going.

Even something as simple as "I'm using this project on this site" means a lot. Sure, the number of stars on a GitHub repository is an indication that people are using and loving what you've done, but at the same time it's very impersonal. I always feel that putting a name and a face to a positive review of something you've done is infinitely more rewarding than any number on a badge.

A compendium of love (cheesy?)

I thought it'd be cool to create a compendium of positive feedback about open-source projects. Sort of the opposite of GitHub issues, it would be a website where open-source projects could have their own page with user-generated comments, or simply links to places where the project is being used.

To project maintainers, this would be a way of collecting useful feedback. On the other hand, the general user could see how other people are using and benefiting from a certain project, potentially helping them make a decision about using it or not.

What are your thoughts? Does anything like this exist already? If not, shall we build it? ∎