I had never published my own npm package before or explored much of the codebase. But slowly (sometimes really slowly) I got used to it. I recall Kent Dodds saying that if you want to be a maintainer of a project, just act and do the things that maintainers do.
This was a really great part of the story for me. Fake it til you make it!
Yeah and you might end up being the "expert" afterwards.
I find myself knowing a lot more about npm/publishing due to the # of packages we have, now switching to scoped packages with @babel/core - switching all user permissions from individual packages to an organization, etc. You deal with a lot of interesting issues as a maintainer (moving issues between repos, deprecation, versioning, etc).
Also important that you remember that when you do learn more since you can emphasize with everyone else and maybe be a guide/help to make things better than when you first started.
Sean Larkin is an award winning public speaker, giving talks all over the world on webpack, JavaScript, and web perf. Currently he is a SWE at Microsoft managing Web Infra for OneDrive/Sharepoint
This was a really great part of the story for me. Fake it til you make it!
Yeah and you might end up being the "expert" afterwards.
I find myself knowing a lot more about npm/publishing due to the # of packages we have, now switching to scoped packages with
@babel/core- switching all user permissions from individual packages to an organization, etc. You deal with a lot of interesting issues as a maintainer (moving issues between repos, deprecation, versioning, etc).Also important that you remember that when you do learn more since you can emphasize with everyone else and maybe be a guide/help to make things better than when you first started.
Story of my life.