What's life after removing yourself from social media? Philip Gee joins Henry (the last in the "trilogy") to chat about LAT, life after Twitter. We discuss being irrelevant, forcing yourself to think about different things, treating a newsletter like email, restraining your growth, moving to the digital suburbs, engaging with the past, directing your attention and production, being particular and local, making it normal again to not have to create. (recorded in July) Transcript: https://hopeinsource.com/digital-death.

First chat (MA 7): https://hopeinsource.com/growing-old
Second chat (MA 15): https://hopeinsource.com/unlisting
Henry: https://twitter.com/left_pad

Headings:

• Intro to the Trilogy
• A Movie Review By a Random Person
• Forcing Your Own Hand
• Email Is a Newsletter without an Archive
• Restrained Growth
• Convenience Over Everything
• Quitting and Twitter Brouhaha
• From City to Suburbs
• Stepping Back By Not Producing
• Conflating Consumption and Production
• Engaging with The Distant Past
• Getting the Last Word
• Showing Charity to Those Things
• Spewing Out Stuff, Undirected
• After Influence, Staying Niche?
• Generality (Mega Church) and Particularity (House Church)
• The Small Scale is the Only Scale
• It's Not Weird To Not Make Anything

Why would you choose to leave the public internet on your own terms? Philip Gee joins Henry (for the 2nd time) to chat about his recent choice to make a minimal public web presence after being on the web for many years. We discuss the logistics of removing social media (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube), moving to longer forms of media (podcasts, essays, books), making introductory content, recognizing different stages of your career, being out of touch, freeing your mind for the next thing, not being ashamed of previous work, taking time to reflect, and friction. (recorded in May) Transcript: https://maintainersanonymous.com/unlisting.

Previous Episode: https://maintainersanonymous.com/growing-old
Henry: https://twitter.com/left_pad

Headings:

• "He took everything down!"
• A Long Time Coming
• Erasure: a minimal public web presence
• Unlisting Yourself
• When I was young, I was in a rock band
• Naturally Transitioning Out
• Tenure as a forcing function
• High School Debut
• Out of Touch
• Ownership Over Our (Digital) Selves
• Posting about Quitting
• No One's Going to Cry
• Making Introductory Content
• More Beginners in a Growing Field
• The Business of Patrons
• Doing the Work vs. Funding It
• Staying or Stepping Away
• Seinfeld and Ending at the Top
• Freeing Your Mind for the Next Thing
• "It's all I've Known"
• Graceful Degradation
• A Time to Reflect
• Acting on Our Beliefs
• Quitting Should be Boring
• Intentionality
• We Are As Athletes
• Adding Friction

What does it mean to be code adjacent? Shawn Wang joins Henry to chat about not just open code but open thinking with his experience in community managing, the idea of tumbling, moderating /r/reactjs, starting the Svelete Society meetup, documenting and learning in public, being historians of our field, fresh notes vs. awesome lists, the meta language, and adoption curves. Transcript: https://maintainersanonymous.com/open-knowledge.

Shawn: https://twitter.com/swyx
Henry: https://twitter.com/left_pad

Headings:

• Intro: Tumbling as an Alternative to Community Manager
• Specific, Limited-term Maintainer Roles
• Separation of Maintainer Concerns
• Babel W18, like YC W18
• Becoming a Moderator for /r/reactjs
• Learning with "I Promise to Answer Every Question"
• History and Memento Mori: A Time Before Git
• Where's the Story of How Projects Get Started?
• A Culture of "Document Yourself More"
• Learning Gears: Explorer, Connector, Miner
• Finding A Vision People Can Rally Around
• Being Code Adjacent
• Maybe We Need a JavaScript Community Manager
• Cheat Sheets and Awesome Lists
• Personalized Docs, Documentation Levels
• Open Source Knowledge, Proof of Work
• Twitter as a Permanent Hallway Track
• Find the Intersection of Two Communities
• Documenting Underlying Assumptions
• "Fresh notes"
• Starting a Meetup: Svelte Society
• Keeping it Alive
• Taking Part in Category Creation
• The Meta Language
• Parenting and Figuring Things Out
• Not Everything Needs to be in Public
• CSS 4: Does It Even Matter if No One Knows?
• Adoption Curves: Focusing too much on the head
• Removing the Learning Curve with Better Defaults
• Philosophy of Technology
• Spatial Software, The Mind

Why attempt to faithfully recreate the past? Jordan Scales joins Henry to chat about 98.css, design systems, being pixel perfect, accessibility, the Microsoft Windows User Experience reference manual, using VMs, MSPaint and Figma, whimsy and having fun with coding, creating satire at no one's expense, and even how Babel's Guy Fieri meme could of been Jeff Goldblum in another universe. Transcript: https://maintainersanonymous.com/nostalgia

Jordan: https://twitter.com/jdan
Henry: https://twitter.com/left_pad

Is the open source community a gift economy? What even is a gift? Maggie Appleton joins Henry to discuss open source as a gift economy (versus a market economy), why we participate in open source and exchange gifts, rituals and habits, patronage and crowdfunding, quantified self and disembodiment, our role in tech

Transcript at: https://maintainersanonymous.com/gift
Maggie: https://twitter.com/Mappletons
Henry: https://twitter.com/left_pad

How should we think about saving something forever? Jonathan Farbowitz (Guggenheim) continues the on-going discussion of software preservation with Henry in talking about the goals of museums, the hard (and maybe impossible) task of keeping something intact, norms and steps of conservation, comparing physical and digital artwork, the importance of authors in conserving a piece, emulation vs. language porting (rewrite), a discussion of legacy/dependencies/testing, and deprecations/breakages in environments/standards.

Jonathan: https://twitter.com/jfarbowitz
Guggenheim: https://twitter.com/Guggenheim
Henry: https://twitter.com/left_pad

In our pursuit to create products for the future do we neglect the past? Wendy Hagenmaier (Georgia Tech) discusses with Henry on the importance of maintaining our history, especially in software itself. They chat all about archival: what is it, what should concern an archivist, differences b/t physical/digital, artifacts/process, value/worth of things to preserve, struggles, places where archival can happen (personal, libraries, companies, museums), and our shared responsibility and knowledge.

Wendy: https://www.library.gatech.edu/wendy-hagenmaier
Software Preservation Network: https://www.softwarepreservationnetwork.org/fcop/
Henry: https://twitter.com/left_pad