Panel:

Charles Max Wood
Aimee Knight
AJ ONeal
Joe Eames

Special Guests: Henry Zhu

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panel talks to Henry Zhu about Babel and open source software. Henry is one of the maintainers on Babel, which is a JavaScript compiler, and recently left this job to work on doing open source full time as well as working on Babel. They talk about where Babel is today, what it actually is, and his focus on his open source career. They also touch on how he got started in open source, his first PR, and more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Henry intro
Babel update
Sebastian McKenzie was the original creator of Babel
Has learned a lot about being a maintainer
What is Babel?
JavaScript compiler
You never know who your user is
Has much changed with Babel since Sebastian left?
Working on open source
How did you get started in pen source?
The ability to learn a lot from open source
Atrocities of globalization
More decentralization from GitHub
Gitea and GitLab
Gitea installer
Open source is more closed now
His first PR
JSCS
Auto-fixing
Prettier
Learning more about linting
You don’t have to have formal training to be successful
Codefund.io
Sustainability of open source
And much, much more!

Links:

Sponsors

Kendo UI
Sentry
Digital Ocean

Picks:

Charles

Orphan Black
Crucial Accountability by Kerry Patterson

Aimee

Desk with cubby holes for cats
The Key to Good Luck Is an Open Mind blog post

AJ

Gitea

JSJ 321: Babel and Open Source Software with Henry Zhu

JavaScript Jabber