Am I neglecting my open source projects?—zachleat.com

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Am I neglecting my open source projects?

#1212<br>10375

August 10, 2026

I have a lot of open source projects (of varying sizes and shapes).

At time of writing, I’m currently maintaining ×78 npm packages. Of those, 22 are super lightweight zero-dependency custom elements a.k.a. 🚾 Web Components (love the future compatibility I get with very little maintenance required). In addition, I also have a few active websites and starter/template projects that are open source too.

I usually rotate maintenance on these and needed a way to quickly scan my little ecosystem of packages to know which ones needed love. Thus, a new little dashboard has appeared on my web site that I’m calling:

Is this still being maintained??

The name pays homage to those helpful passive aggressive comments folks sometimes leave on issue trackers (mirroring a fair question that perhaps I should be asking myself).

Each project is given a Neglect score that represents how much love it needs. It factors popularity (via npm downloads and GitHub stars) and need (GitHub issues and pull requests, npm audits), and recency (npm publish and GitHub commit dates). It shows how many production dependencies (including transitive ones) that a project uses. It even has a little sparkline to give a little data visualization to how frequently packages are published.

A broader look

The aggregate statistics there were genuinely surprising to me. 67 million downloads in the last year (though this is heavily influenced by dependencies I maintain in Build Awesome/11ty, which are counted separately).

Over 1.1k published versions, 4.7k closed issues, and 2.2k pull requests merged! (not all by me, of course)

Currently my most neglected package is the Eleventy Vue plugin (which owns 31 of my 42 total npm audits) and I’m actively deciding whether to revive it or retire it 🫣.

All of my 77 other packages only have 11 total npm audit reports! I’m feeling extremely proud of that, which feels related to the work I’ve been doing to lock down publishing workflows and reduce dependencies. Though that number may change over time, I now have an easy centralized place to check it. This report also makes it very obvious the relationship between dependency count and audit reports. Keep reducing those dependencies, y’all!

The other result of monitoring this report is that I have archived a bunch of old projects that I don’t want to track, which has a nice clensing feeling to it.

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Zach Leatherman is a builder for the web at Font Awesome and the creator/maintainer of Build Awesome (née Eleventy/11ty), an award-winning open source website generator. At one point he became entirely too fixated on web fonts. He has given 89 talks in nine different countries at events like Beyond Tellerrand, Smashing Conference, Jamstack Conf, CSSConf, and The White House. Formerly part of CloudCannon, Netlify, Filament Group, NEJS CONF, and NebraskaJS. Learn more about Zach "

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5 Comments

Wes🔗-->

10 Aug 2026

I prefer "is this project dead??" ????. It both captures the absurdity of the situation and also lets me reply "what is dead may never die".

Zach Leatherman🔗-->

10 Aug 2026

hahah all of my projects are dead and I am but a lowly necromancer animating their corpses

Wes🔗-->

10 Aug 2026

See, this way to talk about it is WAY more fun ????

Wes🔗-->

10 Aug 2026

maybe your dashboard should score them by how animated of a zombie they are instead of how much love they need. Or maybe you could theme it out for Halloween ????

Zach Leatherman🔗-->

10 Aug 2026

what does it mean to feel truly alive?? ????

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