Unexpected popularity of my hobby project: Ups and downs of being an OSS project maintainer

Yash Mehrotra
Rejected
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Talk Description

I made a hugo theme with a friend when I couldn't find any existing theme to my liking. We built everything in open but goal was just to build something me and my friend could use. Our project got somewhat popular organically and along the way I learnt a lot of things:

  • Handling bug reports
  • Planning features without breaking existing flow
  • Responding to absurd feature requests
  • The out-of-no-where I fixed this already working thing PR that no one asked for
  • The "difficult" users
  • Growing in popularity

I'll dive into the journey, dealing with the difficulties and general tips for juggling everything


Note: This is not a project showcase since I won't be talking much into the the details of the project. The talk is more about the journey, managing time, handling different kinds of contributors with some weird & funny instances


PS: This is a 20 min talk but CFP won't let me update it from 10 mins

About the Speaker
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I currently work as a Senior Software Engineer at Flanksource where we are building a mission-control plane for enterprises.

In my free time, I love playing football and badminton. I am also an avid fan of F1 both for its engineering prowess and exciting drama


I've been working on and around developer tools for more than 6 years and have been involved in developer productivity initiatives in all the companies I've worked at. I've been a Software Developer, a DevOps Engineer and a Platform Engineer. I am FOSS advocate and love "converting" people to its philosophy


I love attending conferences and have spoken in many as well (FOSSASIA Vietnam 2024, PyCon India 2023, Gophercon India 2022 and many more)



Reviews Overview
1 People Approved this Proposal
33%
2 People Rejected this Proposal
66%
0 People Marked Unsure
0%
Approvability of proposal
33%
Reviews
I think this will give an overview about what it takes to maintain a OS project.
Reviewer #1 Approved 2 weeks ago
The topic is nice and valuable to the audience but I think it has been talked about a lot on Internet already.
Reviewer #2 Rejected 2 weeks ago
Reviewer #3 Rejected 2 weeks ago