Each month, we partner with the podcast The Changelog on a new Maintainer Spotlight featuring an open source maintainer who is doing interesting work.
This month features Mongoose maintainer (and Tidelift lifter) Val Karpov. Val is a “prolific open source contributor,” said Changelog’s Jared Santos, and the sole maintainer of Mongoose, which is an elegant MongoDB object modeling for NodeJS.
Val has contributed to open source every day for three and a half years straight. He was worried he’d break his streak this year because he had plans to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, but he had to cancel that trip.
“I had hoped to be the first guy to fix a GitHub issue from the summit of Kilimanjaro,” Val said. “That would be a cool claim to fame.”
Val adopted Mongoose back in 2014, not quite knowing how much work would go into it. Thankfully, he’s found jobs where he’s been able to meld his open source contributions with his full-time work.
Val said one of his biggest challenges working on Mongoose involves dealing with the changes that happen in the greater JavaScript community—like the introduction of TypeScript, or now that Docker has gotten popular, dealing with issues specifically in Docker.
His best piece of advice to people dealing with maintainer burnout? Don’t have issue notifications set up. You can’t deal with everything issue that comes in, he said.
You can listen to the full podcast below.
The Changelog 364: Maintainer spotlight! Valeri Karpov – Listen on Changelog.com