[rygine]

I usually don't comment about these type of posts, but I felt I had to speak out here when the author of this article has been an offender of the things he's trying to promote. Perhaps he has just "seen the light," but I have my reservations.

Specifically, these lines got to me:

>If we focus on solutions, focus on helping others, focus on sharing ideas, we’ll be in a better place. We’re all part of a broader community and we all have an impact on it. We can either have a positive impact or a negative one. It’s entirely up to us.

> This is the reality the community faces. We can either work to fix it or we can continue digging a deeper hole for ourselves.

At my company, we were using Lerna [1], a library to help manage mono repos. It wasn't perfect, but it worked. So I thought I'd contribute. I spent a good deal of time replying to issues, fixing bugs, and working on new features.

This was at a time when the author was mostly absent. Without the amazing help of gigabo [2] and hzoo [3], the project would have grinded to a halt. As new users rushed in to use this relatively new tool, there were many new issues and feature requests.

When the author did make his presence known, he was not very helpful [4] [5]. These are just the examples that stood out to me as a contributor. Most people understand that 1 person can't be expected to maintain a big project like this, especially when they are busy at Facebook bootcamp. That's why it had 2 additional members to help. Unfortunately, as a result of [5] above, the author decided he no longer wanted [2]'s help and removed him from the project. He removed a huge contributor because he disagreed with him and failed to openly discuss the issue. Ironic. I stopped contributing immediately. As a result, Asini [6] was born.

The thing that really pisses me off about this post from the author is that he's promoting open communication, sharing, helping others, etc... when it's the complete opposite of my experience with him. Maybe he just had a bad day on those days, maybe it was something else. I don't know him personally, I can only assume things based my interactions. Regardless, this was some extremely poor handling of an open source project.

It looks like he's active on the project again, but it doesn't look like much has changed. [7] [8] [9]

Mr. Kyle, if you're reading this, I really hope you'll follow your own advice. If I have misunderstood your actions in the past, I'm open to being wrong.

[1] https://github.com/lerna/lerna [2] https://github.com/gigabo [3] https://github.com/hzoo [4] https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/255#issuecomment-2289545... [5] https://github.com/lerna/lerna/issues/334#issuecomment-24639... [6] https://github.com/asini/asini [7] https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/255#issuecomment-2523322... [8] https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/386#issuecomment-2640725... [9] https://github.com/lerna/lerna/issues/408

[thejameskyle]

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.

[gigabo]

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.

---

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?

---

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

[rygine]

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.

[pheeney]

thejameskyle replied on reddit for anyone interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/5gmjdx/dear_jav...

---

I have been on the receiving end of Kyle's outrage and I too feel the need to speak out that he has acted in direct opposition to what he is now promoting. I was a new contributor to lerna, no previous interactions with Kyle or babel, and have experienced some of the following:

> My first PR was continuously rejected because he "did not understand my use case". I elaborated several times in great detail. Other project maintainers eventually chimed in that it was a good idea and should be accepted. Kyle continued to keep the issue closed and ignored all contact, including from other maintainers he works with, even to this day.

> My second interaction with Kyle was one of the most highly requested features for lerna (nested directory support). I championed the issue and over the course of a year I attempted to get direction on which path would be accepted to submit a PR. It was ignored, so after a year, I mentioned I wrote some custom scripts and used another project to fill in the gaps. This seemed to immediately set off Kyle and he immediately locked the issue.

> I opened a new issue since the original idea was accepted by Kyle and figured we could start fresh with a new discussion to avoid what led to him closing it in the first place. It was immediately Locked as well.

> I reached out to Kyle on twitter to understand why everything I posted is immediately locked. No response.

> I reached out on Discord to other staff members. Was also ignored. Eventually Kyle communicated with me on Discord with a very illuminating conversion. He didn't like the amount of github notifications he received so instead of unsubscribing he decided to lock all my threads. He provided several other reasons but essentially resorted to bullying tactics and said I should find another community.

> I opened a Code of Conduct investigation because he was actively suppressing all my communication. He abused his power on more than one occasion and the public conversations we had were very aggressive on his part. He was found to be at fault during the investigation by Sebastian. Sebastian said his attempts to talk to Kyle were dismissed. No other maintainers responded to the incident that were listed on the code of conduct. They said nothing can be done about it, so essentially suck it up, even though they mentioned the steps that will be taken in the Code of Conduct. It was a complete joke and they should not have this document live. The only outcome from this was Kyle re-opened the original github issue he suppressed.

> Other babel community members reached out and said they saw the chat and said sorry, it sucks, and they wish there was something they could do. It's nice to know there are people out there who recognize this toxic behavior from project maintainers.

---

The whole experience was very upsetting. I will never contribute or participate with anything involving Kyle. No other maintainers and staff that work with Kyle, held Kyle accountable. At no point has Kyle held himself accountable. I was no one to Kyle, and a potentially new contributor. If I had this experience, I wonder how many others did as well. I am sure his message sounds good but if he doesn't practice what he preaches, then what is all of this for? I hope he has changed.