I’ve been an open-source maintainer of react-native-get-sms-android for 3 years now. It’s been a great experience and it is still a great feeling when I see someone star the project.
Here are a few things that I’ve learned along the way.
People are good
When I was just starting, I was highly critical of pull requests to the project. I thought that maybe there were malicious people out there who wanted the project to fail.
I hate to admit this but I had a PR open for close to a year because I didn’t “trust” it. I only merged the change when another user of the project pleaded that I do so.
I’ve come to learn that when someone makes a contribution, they are solving a pain point and it’s good to offer timely support to get the change merged.
Have great docs
Half of the issues opened on the repo are usually questions related to how the project works.
I realised that better and detailed documentation can help reduce the time it takes to maintain the project and make my experience better.
Changelogs are important
A changelog is a record of all notable changes made to a project. Once your creation is used by many people, changelogs become important to users of the project.
I’ve realised that it’s important to start one sooner because starting later might mean going back to releases and trying to figure out what changed.
I am currently in the process of adding a changelog to the project and this has bitten me hard.
Being a maintainer sometimes means merging changes
I’ve realised that I don’t contribute any feature changes these days but I’ve taken more of a reviewer role. I’ve come to realize that sometimes being a maintainer means being the person that hits the big merge button when the changes look good.
Now, let me get back to finishing that changelog. :)