Development

My love/hate relationship with maintaining an open-source project with half a billion downloads

Key lessons from maintaining a popular open-source library. Discusses commercialization challenges and responsible project management.

Dennis Doomen

Dennis Doomen

Dennis is a Microsoft MVP and Principal Consultant at Dutch Microsoft consultancy firm Aviva Solutions. With 27 years of experience under his belt as a software architect and/or lead developer, he specializes in designing full-stack enterprise solutions based on .NET as well as providing coaching on all aspects of designing, building, documenting, deploying and maintaining software systems in an agile world.

He is the author of Fluent Assertions, an assertion library to make your unit tests look great, Liquid Projections, a set of libraries for building Event Sourcing projections and he has been maintaining coding guidelines for C# since 2001. You can find him on Twitter, Mastodon and BlueSky.

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For the past 15 years, I've been the author of Fluent Assertions, an open-source project with over half a billion downloads. Recently, I made the decision to commercialize it—a move I still stand by, but one that didn’t come without controversy. In this talk, I'll share the key lessons I’ve learned from maintaining a widely used library for so long. We'll discuss what makes a project successful, how to be a responsible maintainer, and ways to monetize an open-source project. I’ll also dive into the challenges of commercialization, managing expectations, and handling difficult (sometimes entitled) users.