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The cover: a line drawing of a donkey under the title

Thanklessly Maintaining Open Source Software

Acting out of the goodness of your heart, or something

by Finite Field

A small library, written to fix an annoyance of your own, gets its first star, and then its first issue. The issues never stop.

This satirical novel follows one developer and config-o-matic through a single year, from the first commit to the archive button. On the way come vague bug reports, entitled feature requests, dependency updates, a CVE with your name on it, a corporate user who needs a fix by Monday, and the fork that takes the project away. The appendices close with canned replies for unreasonable demands.

It is an overgrown joke: the text and the cover drawing were generated with Google’s Gemini, and the book says so on its first page. The paperback, $10.24, is in review at Amazon.

Buy it on Amazon: Kindle, $2.56 →