Comment by thejameskyle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thejameskyle | Hacker News Reader

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I got to work on Lerna for about two months while working at Cloudflare in order to ship cf-ui. Otherwise it was in the middle of a period where I mostly backed out of doing open source because of frustration with the community from early this year. So if Cloudflare hadn't done that I probably never would have gotten involved.

I'm sorry I was often short-breathed when responding. I'm sorry I shut people down more than a few times. From my perspective Lerna was feature complete until Yarn was launched, and people were only ever making feature requests so I didn't see a big deal.

At one point I was frustrated and Bo made it seem like he was going to abuse his power as a contributor and I got freaked out and removed him. He only got more and more vocal from there and I just pushed him out entirely.

Since then I've started a new job, a new relationship, I've been exhausting myself writing new talks. I've had family problems, work problems, fucking country problems... a family member who has been having suicidal thoughts, family who have practically disowned me for being gay and refusing to take their shit.

To be honest, I've barely been getting by in life before we even start talking about open source. I have to take care of that first.

I'm sorry.

Hi James,

I'm really sorry to hear about the difficult time you've been having. I can see how that would make an already thankless job like maintaining an open source project even more frustrating.

During my time as a Lerna contributor I was careful NOT to abuse my power. The few times I merged PRs I checked with Henry first. I pinged you at the beginning, too, but stopped eventually when I didn't hear from you. Mostly what I did, though, was triage issues and work with other contributors to get PRs into shape. I spent a lot of time over the summer working on Lerna, and only a small part of that was the code I wrote myself.

Then, suddenly, you started deleting my comments and locking my issues. You removed me from the organization without any discussion. That seemed to me an abuse of YOUR power. It hurt.

Please re-read the first comment of mine that you deleted. It wasn't meant to be aggressive. It was a plea.

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My inspiration here comes primarily from two sources:

1. Using Lerna every day and thinking about how it could be improved to make my life easier.

2. Listening to feedback from _other_ Lerna users about how it could be improved to make _their_ lives easier.

You're one of the original core team, and I don't want to alienate you. Your rewrite of Lerna put in place a foundation that has been a pleasure to work with. But lately maintenance and improvement has continued in your absence thanks to contributions from Lerna's fledgling user community. Do you plan to reassume this responsibility?

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That was here [1], but you deleted it and then locked the issue. I hope as you read it now you can see why it was surprising and hurtful that this was your response.

[1] https://github.com/lerna/lerna/issues/334

James,

Thanks for the reply, and the apology. Your situation really sucks, and I hope it gets better with time.

Please consider taking a break from some of your projects.

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