{"podcast":{"title":"Sustain","slug":"sustain-796832","podcast_index_feed_id":796832,"rss_url":"https://feeds.fireside.fm/sustain/rss","website_url":"https://podcast.sustainoss.org","image_url":"https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-images-2024/podcasts/images/2/27729c65-f4a6-4496-8c86-820e7f13b285/cover.jpg?v=6","author":"SustainOSS","episode_count":292,"summary":"Sustain brings together practitioners, sustainers, funders, researchers and maintainers of the open source ecosystem. We have conversations about the health and sustainability of the open source community. We learn about the ins and outs of what ‘open source’ entails in the real world. Open source means so much more than a license; we're interested in talking about how to make sure that the culture of open source continues, grows, and ultimately, sustains itself. Newsletter","last_synced_at":"2026-07-25T02:20:58.603315+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/sustain-796832"},"episode":{"title":"Episode 268: Maintainer Month 2025 with Dirkjan Ochtman on Sustaining Critical Rust Libraries","slug":"episode-268-maintainer-month-2025-with-dirkjan-ochtman-on-sustaining-critical-rust-libraries","published_at":"2025-05-09T14:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/sustain-796832/episode-268-maintainer-month-2025-with-dirkjan-ochtman-on-sustaining-critical-rust-libraries","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/sustain-796832","url":"https://podcast.sustainoss.org/268","audio_url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/27729c65-f4a6-4496-8c86-820e7f13b285/d3e5406f-64b7-40d9-a908-d4f56b08b0ca.mp3","summary":"Guest Dirkjan Ochtman Panelist Richard Littauer Show Notes In this special Maintainer Month episode of Sustain, host Richard speaks with Dirkjan Ochtman, a long-time open source contributor and Rust advocate. They dive deep into what it's like maintaining critical infrastructure libraries, the motivations behind taking over \"abandonware,\" and how funding ecosystems like GitHub Sponsors and thanks.dev help sustain low-level dependencies. Dirkjan also reflects on how Rust’s design lends itself well to long-term maintainability and shares thoughts on the challenges of burnout, context switching, and ensuring project continuity. Hit the download button now! [00:01:33] Dirkjan explains how he chooses which projects he’s maintaining, being passionate about memory safety via Rust, and maintaining tools like Rustls, Hickory DNS, and Quinn. [00:03:14] Dirkjan describes his motivation for maintaining abandonware and sees it as providing value to the community. [00:04:23] ISRG funds Dirkjan’s work on memory-safe DNS and TLS libraires, and they are replacing C-based libraires with Rust equivalents. [00:05:33] Dirkjan uses thanks.dev to help fund maintainers through the full dependency graph and revenue is limited but promising. [00:08:06] Richard brings up Tidelift and Dirkjan mentions it’s not yielding results for Rust projects yet because the Rust ecosystem is smaller. [00:09:30] We hear Dirkjan’s journey into Rust, starting in Python but frustrated by lack of type safety and performance, and creating his own compiler before appreciating Rust’s complexity. [00:12:20] Dirkjan talks about his transition from Python to Rust. [00:13:39] Dirkjan uses PyO3 to create Python bindings for Rust libraries. [00:15:31] Richard wonders why projects become unmaintained and Dirkjan responds tha…","meta_description":"Guest Dirkjan Ochtman Panelist Richard Littauer Show Notes In this special Maintainer Month episode of Sustain, host Richard speaks with Dirkjan Ochtman,…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":2058,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/sustain-796832/episodes/episode-268-maintainer-month-2025-with-dirkjan-ochtman-on-sustaining-critical-rust-libraries/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/sustain-796832/episode-268-maintainer-month-2025-with-dirkjan-ochtman-on-sustaining-critical-rust-libraries.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}