Project Lombok's Roel Spilker: Why rejecting good ideas is the hardest part of being a maintainer

Project Lombok maintainer Roel Spilker thinks the hardest part of being a maintainer is rejecting good feature ideas. It’s heartbreaking, he said, to reject something people put a lot of time and effort into. 

But a new feature means more maintenance and work for Roel and Reinier, the creators of Project Lombok. It’s one thing to write a pull request—it’s another thing to maintain a feature indefinitely.

Roel and Reinier created Project Lombok to help remove the inflated boilerplate that comes built into Java projects. They suggested the idea to Oracle, but it was rejected, so they created Project Lombok themselves.

We sat down with Roel when he attended our first maintainer meeting to learn more about what brought him to work on Project Lombok and why he and Reinier decided to sign up with Tidelift.