Going Full Time on Open Source

thunderbong 178 points 38 comments May 06, 2026
jdx.dev · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (12 comments)

drcongo

I hope this works out - I love mise and sponsor on GitHub already.

slopinthebag

Oooh, bad idea. Bun guy is saying OSS will be written exclusively by AI in 2027, with human authors banned.

wek

Congratulations! I think that a lot of the value will be in the judgement of the maintainer about the marginal next feature (and saying no to all those other features) ... if software is a stream then the value is in what gets into the stream. That is an AI resistant value and if you can provide it for your project.

dan_sbl

Good luck, and I hope it works out! Make sure you are ready to ride the roller coaster of highs and lows, as there are going to be many. Remember that your time and experience are the most valuable things you have - make sure you're in control of both.

spankalee

We just started exploring Mise as a (much) simpler alternative to Nix + Bazel for a polyglot monorepo. One of my concerns was about how well maintained Mise would be given that it's mostly a single maintainer, so I think this is good news in that respect. Good luck to Jeff!

hashkb

I had the pleasure of working with Jeff in ... I want to say 2012 - he taught me so much, is a fabulous developer and teammate, and we had some great times together. Edit: mise rocks.

brzz

Pleased for him. I've been an enthusiastic mise user for quite some time, and am keeping an eye on how aube shakes out.

avree

Man, that's a weird looking "f" in the font. Why does it have a tail? Feels like someone is trying to inject a company logo/function symbol into the otherwise normal-looking characters.

kajman

I don't know what to call this - a "freelancer launch"? It is the best executed one I've seen, though. Maybe even a black-mark on OSS if it does not go well.

mihaitodor

10th most downloaded Homebrew formula and the maintainer makes ~$600 / month. Not very encouraging for people who are thinking to follow the same path…

Lazare

Not exactly on topic, but I have to endorse mise; it's a really, really great tool that solves a number of different problems. Example: I was recently working on a large project that needed a specific version of Python, and there's a lot of ways to solve that, but mise was an easy and robust one. But also , the project needed a bunch of different tools to build it, deploy it, do local dev, perform certain maintenance tasks like rotating secrets, work through certain operational runbooks, etc., and mise was an easy and robust way to solve that too. Once you know everyone on the team will have the same tools available, if a runbook would be simpler if you could assume everyone has jq installed, well, just add it your the project's mise config, and now they do. And then when I switched to working on a Java service, and then later a Node service, well, obviously mise was an easy and robust solution there too. By contrast, I made an effort a year or two back to adopt nix, which (despite starting from a very different place) solves a lot of similar problems, but found it a bit daunting (large, complex, poorly documented, and felt hard to partially adopt), and while I love the concept of nix, as a practical matter I ended up abandoning the effort. But mise was really easy to understand, adopt, and progressively add to an existing project without unduly impacting other team members. (Example: Mise will read existing verion manager configs from tools like sdkman, which makes adopting it over time easier.) It's got to the point now where I'm using mise in place of Homebrew or other system level package managers for basically all CLI tools. Which feels weird when I think about it, but mise genuinely just feels like the better solution. If mise has a flaw, I haven't stubbed my toe on it yet.

ggoo

This is great news! I use mise everyday - it's basically muscle memory to type "mise" before a command in many of my projects now thanks to mise tasks

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