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Well today my job is to work on open source. My only other responsibilities are justifying their existence/development/maintenance and integrating them with tooling inside the company.

But before that was my job, I kinda just overworked myself. I’d work my normal job during the week and on night, weekends, and holidays I would do open source. I would be in a bar with friends and I’d be responding to issues on GitHub.

It was a stupid and very privileged thing I did. I don’t want anyone else to try or be forced to do that.

I’m trying to find new ways to address this in our industry. I joined Thinkmill because Jed Watson and I had ideas on how we could reteach companies what open source meant. It’s actually very easy to justify open source within a company… It’s an investment in the quality of life of your codebase. It pays off bigger than a lot of other investments you could make in maintenance.

I also used to burn myself out on conferences. I had this idea in my head that every conference talk had to be completely new. But after awhile I started making “conference friends”, other speakers who speak so often we’ll end up at the same events all the time. I noticed that their talks tended to bleed into each other, often repeating the same exact content.

The JavaScript community is massive, if you want to teach the community a new idea, you have to repeat it over and over and over. Babel didn’t become the next big thing because Seb or I gave some epic talk a few years back. It became a big thing because we kept repeating ourselves over and over and over until we had taught tens of thousands of people.

So speakers should feel free to give the same exact talk a dozen times and evolve it over time. Stop stressing about creating new content constantly.

Also, I get time to attend so many conferences because I’m privileged as hell. I don’t deserve to go more than anyone else. Which is part of the reason I don’t submit talks to conferences anymore (there are other reasons). There’s a limited number of spots, and throwing myself in there is disadvantaging someone else.