For what it's worth, a big part of this is slowly winding down earlier commitments over time. I joined TAG a couple years ago, and decided not to run again this year because I had largely achieved my original goals of changing the composition and mission of the TAG, and others can carry the torch forward. I also retired from the Rails team this year after a somewhat-long period of inactivity (from day-to-day decisionmaking) for similar reasons.
The closest I can get to a single "secret" is aggressively delegating. What I mean by this is delegating before you feel comfortable delegating. The only way I know of to get everything done that I want to get done is to set the vision for something, do some initial implementation work, and find people who share the vision to help as early as possible. The primary reason I end up working on so many things is that things are way more connected than you might expect, and the full picture of something like Ember involves both day-to-day work on Ember and advocacy around a whole host of related technologies. I'm very grateful for the number of groups that have welcomed my participation.
I got involved in Rust largely because it was the shortest path to a low-overhead, non-crashy agent for Skylight, even counting the work we had to do to keep up with ongoing development over the past year. When getting involved in a technology so early, I tend to get really invested, and try to find holes that I know how to fill and fill them. That's what happened with Cargo and a whole bunch of other areas in Rust.
How would you respond to those who see you merely as somebody who just hops on the bandwagon, so to speak, quite frequently?
Whether this perception is right or wrong, there are a number of prominent individuals within the open source community who are widely seen as rapidly jumping between trendy or hyped projects as they arise, to benefit from the exposure that this involvement can bring.
I'm not passing any judgment, mind you. I personally don't care which projects you choose to get involved with. However, I do know that other people have noticed certain trends around how certain open source developers move among projects, and this does negatively affect the impressions these people have of these open source developers and the projects they get involved with.
To be blunt, I would not have picked Ember, Handlebars, TAG or TC39 due to their "hype factor".
In the cases of TAG and TC39, I saw an opportunity to take low-hype, low-bandwagon organizations and revitalize their missions and purpose. In particular, bringing on web developers as active participants and the follow-on effects of having them join GitHub and modern practices (slowly), helped increase their profile and stature. In both cases, I hardly did most of the work, but I did spend a lot of time articulating a vision for these organizations as ones that could be far more effective by involving more practitioners. I think it has worked.
In the cases of Ember and Handlebars, I saw something missing in the ecosystem and built my own tools. In both cases, the tools were hardly instant-winners, and I had to spend a ton of time recruiting fellow-minded collaborators who shared a vision for the future. If I was in it for the bandwagon-hopping, I would have tried to join Mustache or Angular, and not spend years to build up my own, relatively small-in-comparison ecosystems.
My real MO is to try to envision a better future for something related to the web or my product, and then either find existing projects that already share a part of that vision or create them if they do not. My involvement in many different projects is because of the fact that big-picture ideas involve improvements to multiple technologies.
Not sure I agree with your analysis of the situation. W3C TAG, for example, was perceived as a stodgy, out of touch standards body. Yehuda led the charge to reform it and bring it back into the realm of practitioners.
In this case, I think you've got the causality mixed up. Projects often gain prominence thanks to the work Yehuda puts into them, as he's particularly good at articulating their strengths to a wider audience. It's not that he's bandwagon hopping—it's that he's helping to create the bandwagon. ;)
Their loss. It's illogical to fault entrepreneurs or the businesses they are a part of simply because one of an entrepreneur's core strengths and motivators is bringing projects off the ground.
Likewise, it is illogical for faulting a developer for possessing that same drive when it comes to improving emerging technologies.
Squandering one's skills to appease some anti-progress group is silly.
Note that nobody reads every post in linux-kernel. In fact, nobody who expects to have time left over to actually do any real kernel work will read even half. Except Alan Cox, but he's actually not human, but about a thousand gnomes working in under-ground caves in Swansea. None of the individual gnomes read all the postings either, they just work together really well.
What separates TJ from a lot of us is that he isnt afraid to actually go and read some source code,no matter what the language is. That's what separates the good devs from the average ones.How many of us actually read the source of libs or frameworks we use everyday? not that many. But he also have a thing for simplicity,and that is a matter of taste.
I watched his talk Endurance(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYihop9gHj4) to be pretty amazing and inspiring. He talked about some really important points which makes me think and reflect on self. A must watch.
And each of them are lucky to have a share of his time. His contributions to open source are immense.
Much of the software our company use has been shaped, at least in part, by Yehuda. I hope we'll grow the company, so that at some point we'll be able to reciprocate.
Considering you've been coding less than a decade, can you comment on what you think the biggest factor was that lead you to developing such a high level of mastery of solid coding principles? Books, mentoring, reading framework and library code thoroughly?
Wow, you've asked just the question i've been wondering ever since I read that date. Very curious, because it seems like there's been a reliably intuitive focus since the very beginning which generally takes years to develop.
I think the best I can do here is my usual answer: take some time every week to work on a problem that is a little bit harder than what you already know how to do. It requires discipline, and it's hard, but it reliably results in levelling up.
It also helps with humility: if you're constantly working on things that are too hard for you to do, it's hard to build up an unhealthy belief in your own abilities. And humility will keep you open to unexpected learnings from collaborators and people working on related things.
