Reflecting on Maintainer Burden Group Therapy @ #NodeInteractive

When your group discussion ends up on YouTube… you might as well write a blog post about it!

Earlier this month I made the drive up to beautiful British Columbia to attend Node.js Interactive. After nearly two days of awesome technical sessions, there was one final slot remaining before the closing keynotes. I saw a new session show up on the schedule titled “Maintainer Burden Group Therapy” and knew I had to go immediately!

Before we get into what I shared on stage, let’s take a journey through what got me interested me in this session to begin with…

When I joined Splunk as an intern back in the summer of 2013, I began working on several of Splunk’s SDKs. Over the course of my two years as an intern, I went from knowing very little about the process of software development to becoming the sole maintainer of about 15 GitHub projects. The learning process over those two years was…