I'm quitting as Pluto.jl maintainer 👋 - Pluto - Julia Programming Language

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I'm quitting as Pluto.jl maintainer 👋

Tooling

Pluto

pluto

fonsp

July 9, 2026, 9:11am

After an incredible journey, I’m stopping as core maintainer of Pluto.jl. I am proud of what I have achieved. I have happy memories and I feel excited about whatever I will do next! In this post I want to tell my personal reasons for leaving, and say thank you

Looking back

I feel lucky to have worked with so many brilliant people, and I’m really proud! I have learned skills, I made friends, and I have found a new community. And you know what… I think Pluto is really really cool. It’s easy to forget while working on it. There are many good ideas and tech demos out there, but I’m proud to have built something real. Pluto is used to teach in universities around the world. Lots of people have had an easier time understanding science and computers… because of me!

I find it hard to show off sometimes, but I did my best in the recent 1.0 release post, take a look! I will write more about Pluto’s history later in this post.

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Why I quit

In short: I’m quitting because it’s too much, and I need space in my life for other things. And sometimes I feel unhappy with this work. I’m really proud of what I made, but I’m actually not enjoying the process anymore. I also just get too much negative feedback, and I feel lonely trying to make Julia more accessible.

Open source is not glamorous work. I have received so much negativity – why do people express anger and entitlement about something I give away for free? I am sensitive to what other people say and feel, and I had to learn to not take things personal, or to just ignore some people. This strategy works, but it doesn’t feel right to me to actively distance myself. I made Pluto with love, and with care, but the open source world felt too cold for that.

The responsibility as a lead maintainer felt overwhelming at times. I’m responsible for community, marketing, engineering, outreach, design, finances, infrastructure, privacy, security, you name it! Sometimes I was able to share these tasks with others, but financing open source is so hard that I wasn’t able to get people to stay.

I also feel lonely. I am a people person, and asynchronous anonymous FOSS development is not right for me. I need to sit together with people and have an experience together. It’s not all bad – I did have some amazing collaborations with people I met through open source, more on this later! But this has been slowing down in the last years. (Maybe because the project has matured, or maybe because of AI.) The Julia conferences and meetups have always been highlights. I would recommend anyone to go out and find their community! So yeah, I’m grateful for all the time I spent working with people to get to this point. But recently, most open source work is just communicating via emails and bug reports, with people I never met. Or with robots, even worse!

And I feel alone in working on Julia’s accessibility. The magic that I see in Julia is accessible scientific computing. A powerful, expressive language and a toolbox to bring engineers, scientists and programmers together. To me, almost every scientific coding project feels like it would have been better if it was in Julia. But I wish that accessibility to newcomers was a stronger value in our community. There are not enough exciting projects that make Julia accessible – the focus seems to be on making Julia faster, bigger, more advanced. At least, that’s how it feels to me – and I understand that you might see it differently from your perspective!

And my final reason: this just feels like a good point to stop. The project feels well-rounded right now, Pluto doesnt’ need to always be better. It’s actually super good right now! Better than I imagined when starting the project. A logical next step would be to add lots of AI, to make a cloud platform, to support other programming languages. But I don’t need to take the logical next step, and I don’t think that working on these things will make me really happy.

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Next

I will stop contributing to Pluto projects today. I will stay connected to the project until the end of 2026 to make sure that the transition goes well. But from my side, Pluto is… done! It will need to be maintained for future Julia versions, and I hope that the community will contribute. There are still other core...