Episode: 53

Jimmy Bogard: Sustainability and Community from an OSS Veteran

This time it was Liam’s turn with the plague, but like a trooper he showed up anyway.

In this episode, Matt and Liam are joined by Jimmy Bogard (MediatR, AutoMapper) for a candid conversation about the realities of open source in the .NET world.

We explore:

  • Why some libraries emerge from years of real-world pain rather than a weekend side project
  • How tools like MediatR and MassTransit grew out of necessity and hardened through production use
  • The gap between what consumers think goes into a library and what it actually takes to build and maintain one
  • The sustainability problem—what happens when “free as in beer” collides with developer burnout
  • How the .NET ecosystem, Microsoft, and the wider community could better support maintainers

Along the way Jimmy shares hard-won lessons from solving the same problems over and over again—until the solution itself became the library. It’s a perspective that’s easy to underestimate if you’ve never maintained widely used open source.

🍻 Tonight’s Drinks:
Matt – Water
Liam – Lemsip
Jimmy – Definitely not Foster’s 🍺

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Cheers! 🍻

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