Tailwind CSS has 30M weekly downloads and still had to lay off most of its dev team. Popularity != sustainability in Open Source. I wrote about what this says about OSS funding, sponsorships, and why maintenance needs to be treated like a real business cost. robmensching.com/blog/posts/2...

How can Tailwind CSS be so popular yet still struggle with sustainability? robmensching.com/blog/posts/2...

This is the best episode of Deployment Dojo's MSBuild In Depth series yet. It's a capstone of the last 7 episodes. It's also a great example how the Deployment Dojo learning process works. Join me watching it right now! www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyIU...

WiX Online Meeting 302 Live Now We'll be reviewing WiX v7's final list of issues. There's only a bit over a month until WiX v7-rc.1. See you there!

Starting now - Deployment Dojo S2:E8 | MSBuild in Depth www.youtube.com/@firegiantco...

Watch episode 7 of Deployment Dojo with me today at 10:30 AM PST. Let's chat about the serendipitous mistakes I encountered while exploring MSBuild inputs and outputs. youtu.be/R_OoswIrT9E

That’s ingenious

Deployment Dojo Season 2 - Episode 6 replay premeir starts in less than a minute: youtu.be/4W4PmJQzTSY?...

Premier of Deployment Dojo | Season 2 Episode 5 - Metadata Did you know I watch these when they go up live? You can chat with me about the episode while it's first showing. Well, you can. Join me now and we'll watch it together. youtu.be/Gw9tTrahStU

Of the last seven days, I've spent the better part of five of them fixing broken build pipelines due to various external changes. It's an enormous amount of time spent to go nowhere. Am I alone in this? If not, what do you do to battle bit rot?

Here's a crazy thing I just noticed. Vite currently has 52 sponsors on GitHub. WiX has 99. Not an apples-apples comparison, but I never imagined my (insignificant) setup dev tool could be in the ballpark of a (wildly successful) JS dev tool. Yes, it's because of the OSMF.

Deployment Dojo S2E6 Live now! www.youtube.com/@firegiantco

I'm doing a bit of ad hoc testing this morning on a product we've been developing for a long-time customer. I don't get to simply use our products very often. This thing is so cool.

Kids are back to school, and the Deployment Dojo is back on schedule. Today at 10:30 AM PDT S2:E5 - All about Item Metadata. www.youtube.com/@firegiantco...

Surprise! Deployment Dojo S2:E4 live show starts in just a few minutes to make up the show missed earlier this month. Can you make it at the last minute? www.youtube.com/@firegiantco

@jeremiah.sounderatheart.com I saw mention of SKC as a potential trap game. Is it possible that "playing the kids" is an antidote to that? Get a hungry team on the field that is less likely to slip into complacency? :)

Every replay of the Deployment Dojo live show premiers on YouTube and you can watch with me. This last month's replay has just completed. Maybe I'll see you next month on August 6th for the live show or the replay's premier on August 27th.

Deployment Dojo S2E3 is Live! tomorrow morning at 10:30 AM. Here's a 30 second refresher from episode 2.

Does anyone know of any _total beginner_ programming content? I'm mostly finding garbage or content that isn't beginner enough. I don't really have the time to start another YouTube channel myself.

We're only two episodes in, and I feel like we're already back in the groove with season 2 of the Deployment Dojo! Learn tons about MSBuild targets in this episode. Oh, and the FireGiant Cinematic Universe expanded, too.

@james-jackson-south.me how has Paddle been as a MoR? Good, bad, indifferent?

Deployment Dojo Season 2 Episode 2 is tomorrow at 10:30 AM PDT on the FireGiant YouTube Channel www.youtube.com/@firegiantco If you missed Episode 1, here is a 20s summary. Watch the full reply on our channel.

Deployment Dojo S2E1: MSBuild Basics the Property, Item, Target www.firegiant.com/blog/2025/5/...

Open Source Maintenance Fee Two Months In robmensching.com/blog/posts/2...

I had a great conversation with Carl and Richard about the Open Source Maintenance Fee: opensourcemaintenancefee.org. I really appreciate how supportive and genuinely interested they are in getting more Open Source sustainability ideas out into the world. I'll write up more when I get some time.

Reminder: The Deployment Dojo Season 2 starts next Wednesday, 2025/05/07 at 10:30 AM PDT on the FireGiant YouTube Channel www.youtube.com/@firegiantco

Deployment Dojo Season 2 Moves to FireGiant

We are so back. 🏯 Season 2, baby.

WiX v6.0.0 is now available. Update your .wixproj files, load up the WiX CLI package on your favorite build machine, and update the .NET tool installation if you have one. And if you make money using WiX, take note of the new Open Source Maintenance Fee. www.firegiant.com/blog/2025/4/...

The .NET Foundation failed to renew the WiX Toolset's certificate. This broke our first attempt at the official release of WiX v6.0.0. We are now switching to FireGiant's certificate infrastructure to no longer depend on the .NET Foundation for this and future builds of WiX.

Finally. This is what I was asking a week or so ago about RSS. Why didn't Mastodon and Bluesky just do something like this?

This is actually one of the arguments I make for maintainers worried about adding a maintenance fee to their project. The consumers you chase off because they don't want to pay the fee, were just there because they valued your work at $0. You don't need them. You don't want them. Unless...

Seriously, what is missing from RSS that we need all these other protocols to replace it?

So, Microsoft announced a Windows roadmap. I looked at it and saw nothing of interest. Am I missing something cool?

Maintainers: The Open Source Maintenance Fee EULA is signed off and ready for use in your project. Everything you need to enable the OSMF in your project is now available. opensourcemaintenancefee.org/maintainers/...

Reviewing and editing legal license documents feels like programming in English without unit tests or even a compiler readily available. But I think we're getting very, very close now.

Introducing the Open Source Maintenance Fee

Open Source Software is free, but Open Source Project maintenance is expensive. The Open Source Maintenance Fee directly funds your projects' maintainers. Simple. Sensible. Sustainable. opensourcemaintenancefee.org?utm_source=B...

For all the Open Source Maintainers, a message to the world.

Found a glitch in the final render of the video this morning so publishing will have to wait until tomorrow. Should I throw up a teaser? On the upside, watching and listening to myself speak over and over in all these edits has completely desensitized me to my own voice.

I just finished recording my first ever non-Live streamed YouTube video. It also happens to be the most important video I've ever recorded to date. Publishing soon.

Yesterday was my 48th birthday. Each birthday, I take time to reflect on the past year. 2024 was rough. It was the cumulation of 3 years of frustration. Frustration that led to changes. Two changes were already implemented. The third comes next week. https://buff.ly/3ELEaxj

Forty Eight

It's been a busy couple of weeks. We started with the FireGiant website refresh, merged wixtoolset.org, bid farewell to WiX v3 (and v4) and now launched WiX v6-rc.1. And I have one more thing to launch in the next couple of weeks.

I finally finalized my Bluesky profile. :)

Delighted to have helped deliver the new firegiant.com website, built with @astro.build + #vue, with the docs moved to #starlight. A fantastic stack.

A fresh coat of paint just went up on firegiant.com today. With the new look we also launched the new name for our support program, WiX Developer Direct. I think "Developer Direct" better captures everything we offer. Plus we added monthly office hours coming soon.

I'm still putting my home studio back together after dismantling it during the power outage late 2024. Today I had a customer call and thought I had enough working to do video. Fill light wouldn't respond. Tonight, discovered it was simply turned off. How's your day going?

IMNSHO, maintenance as a whole is completely overlooked despite "maintainer" being the title thrust upon the owners of Open Source projects. For the record: I dislike that we're called"maintainers" while YouTubers get to call themselves "creators". But, whatever.