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Stop Burning Out Maintainers: An Empathetic Guide for Contributors

BekahHW on January 30, 2024

As a bootcamp grad myself, I can understand that it’s overwhelming to try to break into the industry with so many people giving you advice. I remem...
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Ayu Adiati

💯 and love this! 🤩🤩🤩

hell to the yeah gif

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BekahHW

Thanks, Ayu!

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Christine Belzie

Great tips @bekahhw! :) I’ve been looking to find a checklist for doing contributions (being a maintainer and contributor for a certain period of time can put you in an autopilot state) , so that you for coming up with one in the Check Your Work Section.

Also, “Appropriate and good communication is not optional.” is something I’m going to use for now on.

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BekahHW

Glad you found it useful!

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G. Jiang

Thanks for the great read!

Just finished a programming bootcamp and been super curious (yet kinda nervous) about diving into open source.

*Your guide breaks it down beautifully and feels like a chat with a mentor. *

Those checklists for newbies? Gold. They're exactly what I needed to finally get my feet wet without tripping up.

Really appreciate you shining a light on how to do it right. Cheers!

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BekahHW

Thanks, Gary. I really appreciate your message.

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Lymah

This is epic! Thanks for sharing.

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BekahHW

Thanks for reading!

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Sidharth Mohanty

This is awesome, much recommended for beginners in open source!

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BekahHW

Thanks for reading!

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Andy Larkin

How do you combat burnout? because for me this is a very difficult moment

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BekahHW

Here’s a resource I helped put together. I highly recommend the linked talk at the end. virtualcoffee.io/resources/develop...

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Vadym Marukhnenko

Thanks for sharing

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Anthony J. Borla

Deepest thanks for a most welcome (even necessary) contribution.

I sincerely hope it is widely read, and its contents absorbed and applied.

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BekahHW

Thanks so much!

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Moheshwar Amarnath Biswas

Great read!

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BekahHW

Thank you!

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Isa Bensusan

I feel like this should be required reading for contributing to any project

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Anmol Baranwal

I'm an open source maintainer along with Christine, and I couldn't agree more.

I even suggested not to participate in Hacktoberfest or any competitions where most of them just do stuff for the sake of the PRs as a competition.

I've seen some people not even reading contributing guidelines contributing.md, even when there are clear instructions using GitHub bot and everything. Some even have stale PRs, which is the most frustrating thing.