A month without contributions
30 Jun 2021EasyAdmin is a popular admin generator for Symfony applications. It’s an open source project with millions of downloads but it hasn’t allowed a single contribution for the past 30 days. Nobody could create an issue or pull request during the past month. Keep reading to know why.
Open Source is asymmetric
In Open Source projects there’s usually 2 to 4 orders of magnitude in the number of consumers and contributors (1 person will contribute for every 100 to 10,000 people who use the project).
This difference happens in all kinds of projects. Symfony for example is the backend project with most contributors in the entire world and it just has a few hundred contributors, compared to the hundreds of thousands of developers who use it.
This difference is especially big in EasyAdmin. While the number of downloads keeps rising significantly, contributions are lacking. In addition, most contributions are just bug reports instead of pull requests fixing those bugs. Sadly, many bug reporters expect me to fix everything without their help.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m lucky because EasyAdmin community, like the rest of the Symfony community, is very kind and polite, especially our sponsors. However, too many people demand me to fix their bugs and too few people offer any help.
EasyAdmin is not my work
I store all my coding projects in two folders: /Users/javier/work/ and
/Users/javier/projects/. This helps me better differentiate my paid work and
my side-projects and Open Source contributions. EasyAdmin code is stored in
projects/, so it’s not my work. I spend time on it (several thousands of hours
so far) because I enjoy it and I’m very glad that it’s useful to others.
However, the fact that most “contributions” are just bug reports means that most of my contributions are fixes for those issues. This is making my EasyAdmin experience miserable. Instead of a fun project, it feels like a boring (and unpaid) job.
Also, the stream of bug reports and feature requests is not sustainable. When I fix a bug, we quickly receive 5 new bug reports. And when I fix 5 bugs, we receive 10 more, and so on. This must stop.
You need silence to focus
Have you ever tried to do some work which required to focus while some kids are shouting, fighting and screaming in the background? You can’t. You need silence (or some specific kind of generated noise or music) to focus on your work.
That’s why I decided to stop all contributions in EasyAdmin repository for 30 days (you can do that in GitHub -> Your Project -> Settings -> Moderation Settings -> Interaction limits). I needed that long period of silence for my own mental health.
During this time, I’ve fixed many issues and completed some important tasks such as the migration to Bootstrap 5 (and the removal of jQuery). All this was possible because I no longer had to read things like “I have this bug, fix it!”, “Please take a look at my problem”, “Any updates about this?”, etc.
I don’t work for you
This “no contributions” experience has been a success for me and the project. However, this is an open source project, so you need to allow user contributions at some point. That’s why contributions are open again for EasyAdmin, but with some changes.
I will no longer fix bugs that don’t affect me. I will fix bugs that affect my applications in addition to obvious bugs and security bugs. That’s all. This is important because I don’t work for you or your company. I can work with you to solve the issues that you are experiencing, but you need to do most of the work.
I hope these changes help us move the project forward in a sustainable way. I also thank all of you who contribute in one way or another to this project. If you or your company are looking for a quick way of contributing, consider sponsoring me on GitHub. Thanks!