We talk to Timothy Chen (@tnachen) about how large open-source projects like Apache Mesos, Kafka, Spark, among others manage code reviews, and contrast the different processes and rigor set by the maintainers. We discuss how finding a balance in the strictness and the scope of the code reviews is important as a new project tries to attract new contributors, and discuss examples from projects who have done this well — in addition to those who have not. We also discuss the Broken Window Theory of software maintenance.

Timothy is a developer-turned-VC. In the past, he was the founder of HyperPilot and has served as the SVP of Tendermint, where he worked on the Cosmos blockchain SDK. He's been a prolific contributor to open-source, with associations to projects like Apache Mesos, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, and Kubernetes. He's also a member of the Apache Software Foundation.