The Challenges of Maintaining a Popular Open-Source Project

In this talk, I will give an insight into what it means to maintain a popular project for me personally, what it involves and what we as a community can do to help out and finally why I think it’s an important discussion to have.

Cookiecutter is a command-line utility that creates projects from templates. It is free and open-source software distributed under the terms of a permissive BSD-3 license. With around 180 individual contributors, more than 1000 public templates on GitHub alone, and multiple talks at conferences, it is fair to say that there is a small community around it.

But who are the people behind the project and what is it that they are doing?

It’s been three years since I was granted the commit bit by the core team. I have learned a lot about FOSS communities and also about myself. At times I struggle with balancing my day job as a full-time Software Engineer and maintaining Cookiecutter and other FOSS projects in my spare time. By now I’m OK with not responding to issues immediately and closing pull requests. However it took me quite a while to get to this point.

Maintaining FOSS projects can be incredibly rewarding and fun, but it can also be quite frustrating. It involves so much more than writing code or merging PRs, and yet sometimes it feels like that’s what most people think. The goal of this talk is to start a conversation around this topic and hear what other EuroPython attendees think about it and their challenges as contributors or maintainers.