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5 Things I Learned in My First Week as a Maintainer

Laurie on November 05, 2019

I took a week off from blogging and in that time a couple of things changed. I joined Gatsby and became an open-source project maintainer overnight...
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Nick Taylor • Edited

Thanks for sharing! Sounds like you're off to a busy start at Gatsby.

One tool I've found useful as a maintainer, but also as a contributor to OSS is the Refined GitHub extension. 🔥

GitHub logo sindresorhus / refined-github

Browser extension that simplifies the GitHub interface and adds useful features

Refined GitHub

Browser extension that simplifies the GitHub interface and adds useful features

We use GitHub a lot and notice many annoyances we'd like to fix. So here be dragons.

Our hope is that GitHub will notice and implement some of these much needed improvements. So if you like any of these improvements, please email GitHub support about doing it.

GitHub Enterprise is also supported. More info in the options.


Install

Highlights 🔥

Adds button to mark issues and PRs as unread
(They will reappear in Notifications)
Adds one-click merge conflict fixers
Adds reaction avatars showing who reacted to a comment Adds the option to wait for checks when merging a PR
Linkifies issue/PR references and URLs in code
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Laurie

Ooh I’ll take a look!

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Ben Halpern

Upstream is not a git keyword

These are such funny little details. I've definitely found myself on either end of this type of conversation/realization before.

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Laurie

Absolutely! And it says something that examples are so uniform that one could infer it is a keyword.

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Kenny Fairris

Good things to know! And thanks for showing that we're all human. We learn more from our mistakes don't we?! :-)

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Binyamin Green

I'd like to start contributing to open-source in earnest (not just a random PR). Where should I start?

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Laurie

That’s great! A lot of projects will tag their issues at first time friendly. Docs are also a great place to start.
Look for projects that you use or are excited about in some way.