Yesterday was my last day as a maintainer of TensorFlow Addons. One of my first and last commits were adding and removing myself as a code owner respectively. June 16th 2019 to 17th May 2020. It was a good eleven months.
I’ve read many blog posts about other maintainers quitting due to a toxic, ungrateful community. Fortunately, that is not the case for me. I found myself with increasingly less time for maintainer duties. I don’t think I’ve reviewed a PR in the last month, so I decided the best course of action forward for both me and the TFA community would be for me to step down as maintainer.
Although my stint as maintainer was rather brief, it was an absolute joy. I got to work alongside some phenomenal people: seanpmorgan, facaiy, windqaq, guillaumekln, shun-lin, gabrieldemarmiesse, aakashkumarnain and autoih. It’s funny that I spoke to these people nearly every week, but I associate them with their GitHub usernames over their real names.
I will still be an active member of the community, and try to contribute as much as possible. I wish the current TFA maintainers and the community nothing but the best.
On a personal note, this maintainership has been my biggest achievement yet. It kills me to have to leave it. I had to learn how to review code, design APIs, deal with bugs and deprecate features. More importantly, I learnt how to deal with the rare less-than-pleasant people. It even helped me get my current job, which I absolutely love.
On a final note, this is the commit I’m undoubtedly most proud of. It was groundbreaking.
Written on May 17th, 2020 by Dheeraj R. Reddy