From Discord Helper to OSS Maintainer (w/ Dominik Dorfmeister)
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What does it take to accidentally become the maintainer of one of React's most popular libraries? In this episode, we sit down with Dominik Dorfmeister (aka. TkDodo), maintainer of React Query (now TanStack Query), to unpack his unexpected journey from answering Discord questions during COVID to maintaining a library with 10 million weekly downloads.
Dominik reveals how spending months just helping people on Discord led to becoming a core maintainer of the TanStack ecosystem. We dive deep into React Query's stability-first approach, the challenges of managing breaking changes across multiple frameworks, and why the React adapter is surprisingly the most complex to maintain.
From deleting 20,000 lines of dead code at Sentry to building platform teams that enable developer productivity, Dominik shares insights into maintaining software at scale.
Our Fantastic Guest
Dominik Dorfmeister
Software Engineer from 🇦🇹, working at Sentry, maintaining TanStack Query
BlueSky
Links and Resources
Dominik's Blog
Query.gg
Knip Docs
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Chapters
1. Introduction (00:00:00)
2. The COVID Discord Origin Story (00:00:30)
3. From User to Maintainer (00:06:45)
4. Career Impact of Open Source (00:13:15)
5. React Query's Current State (00:18:45)
6. TanStack's Multi-Framework Strategy (00:29:15)
7. React's Communication Problem (00:38:20)
8. Simplifying React Query's APIs (00:42:15)
9. Platform Engineering at Sentry (00:46:30)
10. The Great Knip Cleanup (00:50:15)
11. Closing Thoughts (00:52:30)
15 episodes