Our guest today is none other than the wonderful Matteo Collina. Matteo is a returning guest on the podcast, and we are so excited to catch up with him. There's a lot of ground to cover here, including philosophy, the highs and lows of being a maintainer, and the world of TypeScript.

Matteo leads us in a discussion of testing infrastructure. The sequence of events should be simple. Write an application, write a test for it. But when the test doesn't accurately reflect the running environment, the results won't be of much use. Some tests may be good for determining if your business logic is sound, but do they actually do what they say on the tin?

We also chat about the muddy world of aging frameworks, especially if you’re a maintainer trying to juggle everything. Picture it as a game of guacamole. You patch one bug, but now five more have popped up out of nowhere. It's an unfortunate reality. Then there's the matter of the one person thousands of miles away who was relying on that one bug to hold up their whole system, which you have now ruined, and they will definitely be letting you know about it. Strongly worded email incoming.

This leads us on to the topic of (as Matteo dubs them) “open source vampires”. Those who suck the life out of open source maintainers without ever expecting to give anything back - least of all money. It can be easy as a developer to fall into this parasitic relationship, which inevitably leads to burnout, and potentially even more serious mental health issues. It's important to value yourself and your time, even when others don't.

Thank you Matteo for reminding us of this!

Reach out to Matteo here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matteocollina/

Read Matteo’s blog about the stats on Node.js: https://blog.platformatic.dev/nodejs-is-here-to-stay

Find out more and listen to previous podcasts here: https://www.voxgig.com/podcast

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