Maintaining 80 OSS Projects: Anthony Sottile on pre-commit and Developer Tooling

In this episode, I'm chatting with Anthony Sottile — creator of pre-commit, primary maintainer of flake8, core contributor to pytest, and maintainer of around 80 open source projects across the Python ecosystem. He's also a GitHub Star and a popular live coding streamer on Twitch under the name "anthonywritescode". We dig into how he actually manages all of it, the origin story of pre-commit, the psychological side of open source maintenance, and how to get started contributing. Outline 00:00 Episode highlights & Intro 0:59 The all-repos tool — distributed refactoring across repos 2:04 Where the idea came from (Yelp's microservices explosion) 2:42 Tools for managing multiple repositories 3:34 How pre-commit got started (a college group project) 4:15 Rewriting pre-commit for Yelp in 2018 4:46 Hardest technical challenge: supporting 13 programming languages 6:07 Surprising bugs found in NPM and Git 7:05 GitHub Stars and open source funding 8:10 How Sentry approaches funding open source 8:43 The psychological challenges of open source maintenance 10:06 What would you tell your past self? 11:32 How to start contributing to open source 13:05 Why Anthony started streaming on Twitch 13:52 What motivates him to keep streaming 14:58 Has community interaction changed how you design code? 15:48 Where to find Anthony online Episode links – pre-commit: https://pre-commit.com – all-repos: https://github.com/asottile/all-repos – Anthony's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@anthonywritescode – Anthony's Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/anthonywritescode