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