x x x

Who?

Github: gaearon

Project: React

Date: August 2017

Why?

Dan Abramov cited three primary reasons that caused him to temporarily disengage from open source and even after his return, reducing the amount of contributions he makes. Prior to pausing his contributions to open source projects, he maintained React as a software engineer at Facebook.

“I spend an unhealthy amount of time on like managing issues and pull requests and stuff. But I also have a full-time job so it was like, I really didn’t have a work life balance at all.” (49:55)

He was overwhelmed with his work in open source work since it was closely tied to his full-time job at Facebook as well as his personal life.

“I was just tired. Like if you do this full time it’s not as much fun to do it at home too.” (52:44)

Dan was constantly exhausted by his responsibilities regarding open source projects like React, which led him to regret ever learning to code at all.

Interviewer: “Knowing what you know now, if you had to learn to program all over again, how would you do it?

Abramov: “I wouldn’t do it.” (54:35)

Despite his strong beliefs at the time of this podcast, Dan has resumed contributing to open source projects, especially React, in the past year.

For reference:

Interventions

Dan encourages seperation between personal and professional (open source) work, or more specifically to stop coding at home and not work on open source projects as one’s full time job.