For the past 16 years, I've been the maintainer of Fluent Assertions, an open-source project with 800+ million downloads. Last year, I made the decision to commercialize it—a move I still stand by, but one that didn’t come without controversy. Nonetheless, since then, I've started six new projects with renewed energy.

In this talk, I'll share the key lessons I’ve learned from maintaining widely used open-source projects for so long. We'll discuss what makes a project successful, how to be a responsible maintainer, and ways to monetize an open-source project. I’ll also dive into the challenges of commercialization, managing expectations, and handling difficult (sometimes entitled) users. And since we're in the age of AI, I'll share how I use AI myself and deal with the flood of AI pull requests.