Lessons learned from maintaining open-source Python projects

Abstract

I started maintaining open source projects back in 2016 with tox. In 2018, I became a virtualenv maintainer. Today, this has now ballooned to 16 different packages where I’m the primary maintainer (+6 other projects where I help out). On average, these packages get more than 360 million downloads each month.

In this talk, I will share my experience, and explore how I manage to pull this off while also having a primary job and a family. I will present which techniques I tried, what worked, and what did not. I will also share my views on how one should approach maintaining an open source package to avoid burnout.