Erik Rasmussen Chats With Kent About Maintaining Open-Source Libraries

Erik built the Redux Form library to help manage form states in Redux. He decided to open-source Redux Form, and it exploded and became very, very popular.

People kept coming up to Erik with additional use cases, and the form library itself kept growing to the point where the bundle size got out of hand and saying yes to all the requests for features created a monster.

So Erik came up with his second form library "final-form." This time he created a plugin architecture to reduce the maintenance and make the library more capable of handling unconsidered use cases.

Erik talks about the key things that need to happen for a library to take off. First, it has to be documented well, and the motivation has to get explained clearly. Second, someone who has a following needs to love it and share it with people. Third, you've got to be there on the ground, ready to make quick fixes as people give them to you.

Homework

• Release some open-source software!

Resources

• Final Form
• Redux Form
• How to Write an Open Source JavaScript Library
• How to Contribute to an Open Source Project on GitHub
• OSCON 2014: How Instagram.com Works; Pete Hunt

Guest: Erik Rasmussen

• Twitter: @erikras
• GitHub: @erikras
• Keybase: @erikras

Host: Kent C. Dodds

• Website: kentcdodds.com
• Twitter: @kentcdodds
• GitHub: @kentcdodds
• YouTube: Kent C. Dodds
• Epic React: epicreact.dev