Looking for New Maintainers blog post

Author: patrick96

_posts/2025-05-25-New-Maintainers.md

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+---
+author: Patrick
+account: patrick96
+title: Polybar Is Looking for New Maintainers
+---
+
+Those following the polybar development have probably noticed that the last
+activity on [GitHub](https://github.com/polybar/polybar) was seven months ago.
+While I am still technically a maintainer, I have not been doing my job, and I
+don't see myself doing it in the future.
+
+Polybar is still popular (though not as much as it used to be), so i don't want
+to just shelf the project, but I give it another chance at thriving. Because of
+that, I'm looking for people who would be interested in taking over some
+responsibility around maintaining polybar. 
+I don't want people to get into the same position I am in with the whole
+project resting on their shoulders.
+Instead, your involvement here would be **as big or as small as you like**.
+With me not being around, things have fallen by the wayside and polybar could
+use your help here:
+
+* Responding to, labelling, and/or closing issues that pop up
+* Reviewing and merging pull requests
+* Fixing bugs
+* Implementing new features
+* Writing documentation: Polybar is pretty light on introductory documentation. Most of our "docs" are more like a reference manual
+* Or anything else you feel like could make the project better
+
+If you think you would like to do any of these, you can drop me a quick email
+the thing(s) you would like to help out with. You can find my email address on
+my [GitHub profile](https://github.com/patrick96).
+
+Ideally I would like this to be a gradual transition.
+I'm a bit hesitant to give full admin access to any person writing me an email
+because of things like the [XZ supply-chain
+attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor). I also don't want to
+just drop the whole project in someone else's lap and disappear forever.
+So initially I would add new maintainers with triaging or write permissions,
+upgrading those if they want to take on more responsibility in the future.
+
+This would of course mean that I'm still involved in the project for the time
+being. I don't think there's a way around that if I want a smooth transition to
+new maintainers. And while I am no longer investing time into writing code or
+reviewing PRs, I will commit to being available to the new maintainers during
+this transition, to answer any question they have.
+Ultimately, I would very much like to give over full control of the project to
+a group of maintainers.
+
+## Why Am I Not Doing This Anymore?
+
+I first started contributing to polybar back in 2016 when it was still called
+"lemonbuddy" and was just a frontend, spitting out formatting tags for
+[lemonbar](https://github.com/LemonBoy/bar).
+In 2017, [jaagr](https://github.com/jaagr), the original creator of polybar
+asked me to help him maintain polybar.
+Back then I just started my computer science degree, itching to do more coding
+next to my regular coursework.
+Today, I have a full-time job and besides not having as much free time as
+before, I also no longer have the same motivation to write code outside of
+work. Since graduating, working on polybar has felt like, well, work, and I'm
+already doing enough of that during the day.
+
+## Wrapping Up
+
+This was kind of hard to write because I am finally admitting, more to myself
+than anyone else, that I'm no longer maintaining polybar, even though I have
+functionally not being doing it for a while.
+Being a maintainer here as taught me a lot, not just about coding, but about
+infrastructure, governance, writing, and many different software technologies.
+I don't think I would be where I am today without it.
+
+If you made it this far. Thank you!
+Thank you for being a part of this community and thank you for considering
+helping out further.
+
+And I also want to thank everyone who has contributed to polybar over the years
+in any way shape or form to make it the project it is today.
+
+I do hope that this can bring some fresh air into the project, setting it
+up for a bright future.
+
+See you on the internet
+
+--- Patrick