If you've dealt with dates in the browser, chances are you've used Moment.js. Moment has been the date library for JavaScript in the past years. In a humble prelude of the documentation, the Moment maintainers talk about the (near) deprecated status of the project.

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Reviewing pull requests, I often see contributors sneakily adding editor configuration to the repository's .gitignore file.

  composer.lock
  package.lock
+ .vscode

If everyone would commit their environment-specific .gitignore rules, we'd have a long list to maintain! My repository doesn't care about your editor configuration.

There's a better solution to this: a personal, global .gitignore file for all your repositories. Here's how you can set one up.

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This was originally a lightning talk at Full Stack Europe 2019. You can watch the video on their YouTube channel.

In the 4.5 years I've been a developer at Spatie, over 200 packages have been built and released by our team. I've done quite some authoring and maintenance over the years, and I'd like to share 8 actionable tips on writing and maintaining open source software without going insane.

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React follows semantic versioning, but with a twist. From their versioning policy:

When releasing critical bug fixes, we make a patch release by changing the z number (ex: 15.6.2 to 15.6.3).

When releasing new features or non-critical fixes, we make a minor release by changing the y number (ex: 15.6.2 to 15.7.0).

When releasing breaking changes, we make a major release by changing the x number (ex: 15.6.2 to 16.0.0).

The twist is subtle: non-critical bugfixes are released as minor releases.

I've often wondered whether three digits really is necessary for versioning. As a package maintainer, deciding between minor and patch is often a gray area.

Two digits would suffice: breaking changes and non-breaking changes. Feature or bugfix doesn't really matter from a technical point of view: upgrading can either break things, or can't.

React reserves the patch number for critical bugfixes, which I believe is a necessary escape hatch in a two digit system. But I like I how they default to simply bumping minor versions.

The other day, I stumbled upon an older article by DHH. “Work on what you use and share the rest”.

My core philosophy about open source is that we should all be working on the things that we personally use and care about. Working for other people is just too hard and the quality of the work will reflect that. But if we all work on the things we care about and then share those solutions between us, the world gets richer much faster.

I’ve been keeping this in the back of my mind the past few months.

I was always adding features because I’d expect other people to expect them. It’s a trap! You’re not making people happier by guessing what they might need. You’re not doing anyone a disservice by building things for yourself.

Building things for yourself makes it easier to ship something you feel happy about. It makes it easier to ship something at all.

Don’t forget to be selfish as an open source maintainer every now and then. It’s a good investment in the long run.

I used to fall in the trap of thinking I needed to add features because other people might expect them to be a part of my code, not because I need them myself.

Maintaining a number of open source projects comes with a number of issues. Reporting a good issue will result in a more engaged approach from project maintainers. Don't forget: there's a human behind every project.

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