Building things sustainably

[romainmenke]

There are few concepts which I think are relevant/interesting here :

• building something new is easier than maintaining an existing thing
• maintainers have a lot of knowledge about their domain
• losing a maintainer means losing knowledge
• interop is a good thing
• innovation is good
• innovation is hard in existing things
• disruption is bad
• users like tools that help them
• users dislike friction from tools (even when the tool is an overal positive)
• it takes time to discover the area's of friction
• it takes more time for small area's of friction to become frustration
• new tech/patterns might emerge that invalidate years of work
• sunk cost fallacy
• maintainer burnout
• toxicity in the tech landscape
• lack of funding
• a bug for one user is a feature for another
• following existing specifications is good
• no one wants to specify behavior in DX tools (should there be specs?)
• introducing change in an existing tool is stressful
• tests are local and not reusable between projects
• issue bankruptcy
• signal noise

[romainmenke]

In an ideal world each community solves each problem once :

• we collaborate
• we pick the best tech and patterns
• we agree on what needs to be build
• we agree on how it must work
• workload is shared
• knowledge is shared
• funding is shared

We can not apply late stage capitalist ideals onto open source software and fool ourselves into believing that competition is a good thing. The thing we are competing over is time until burnout.