I see this pattern all the time on GitHub. A promising project starts to catch a lot of stars. Issues start piling up, and the developer no longer looks forward

I see this pattern all the time on GitHub. A promising project starts to catch a lot of stars. Issues start piling up, and the developer no longer looks forward to working on the project because of they have a boatload of issues to deal with first. An issue is much like an email. Closing an issue requires communicating with (sometimes unreasonable) people. Furthermore, when issues start piling up, critical issues are hidden alongside less important ones making it even more difficult to prioritize. One way of dealing with things is to maintain inbox zero. Take action right away - delegate, archive or save for a later date. This won't work forever though as your project's userbase grows. Two high quality libraries with benevolent dictators handle issues very differently: Peewee (coleifer): https://github.com/coleifer/peewee/issues https://github.com/coleifer/peewee/issues Tornado (bdarnell): https://github.com/tornadoweb/tornado/issues https://github.com/tornadoweb/tornado/issues