Why writing this, and why now? In January 2018 I started my journey as a maintainer of the React Native (RN) open source repo — it is the longest role I’ve ever kept going in my professional career, in a way — and I think now, at the 4 years mark, it is a very good time for me to pause, and force myself to think about how things have changed since then.
How did I become a maintainer? After a big burnout with react-navigation that led me to learn how to correctly interact with Open Source Software (OSS), I was starting to interact with OSS again by being a good citizen in the RN repository. Seeing me constantly in the issue section, trying to help out, led some Facebook (FB) engineers to decide to ask me to join the OSS repo with write access, so that I could be more proactive in helping its maintenance… and here we are.
Even so, I was never an em
