029 | Inside PnPjs: Open Source at Enterprise Scale with the Library Maintainers

In this episode, Andrew and Julie sit down with Beau Cameron and Patrick Rodgers, two of the core maintainers of PnPjs, for the podcast's first guest interview. PnPjs is a client-side TypeScript library that wraps both the SharePoint REST and Microsoft Graph APIs into a fluent, developer-friendly interface. With 38,000 tenants relying on the library and handling roughly 38 billion requests per month, PnPjs has become one of the most mission-critical open source projects in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. The conversation digs into the real challenges of maintaining a library at that scale, including architectural decisions like the elegant Timeline design, controversial API choices around URI escaping and the Pages API, and what it means to be responsible stewards of an open source project by refusing to wrap unsupported or reverse-engineered endpoints. You'll also get a peek at what's coming in v5, which Beau and Patrick describe as a maintenance-focused release aimed at improving code coverage, test execution, and expanding Microsoft Graph API coverage.

The hardest part of maintaining PnPjs isn't the code itself, it's maintaining trust. Beau, Patrick, and Julie explore the tough decisions they've had to make as maintainers, from dropping support for legacy v2.1 endpoints to pushing back against shipping features that don't quite work right. Whether it's understanding the design tradeoffs baked into the Timeline architecture, wrestling with the extensibility of behaviors and virtual events, or grappling with the consequences of being used at such massive scale, this episode offers genuine insight into what it takes to steward a library that countless developers depend on every single day.

🔗 LINKS
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🎁 Picks
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Andrew's Pick(s):
🔗 Claude Code Unpacked

🎙️ HOSTS
Julie Turner
Andrew Connell: LinkedIn, YouTube, Bluesky, Newsletter

🎙️ GUESTS
Patrick Rodgers: LinkedIn, Bluesky
Beau Cameron: LinkedIn, Bluesky, Site

SPONSORS
Sympraxis (by Julie Turner) 🔗 Ask Sympraxis 🔗 YouTube
Voitanos (by Andrew Connell) 🔗 LinkedIn 🔗 Bluesky

Music Credit: Ken Bagley

Creators and Guests

Beau Cameron
Guest
Beau Cameron
Microsoft MVP | Microsoft 365 Development | PnP Team | Full Stack | Trout Angler 🎣
Patrick Rodgers
Guest
Patrick Rodgers
OneDrive and SharePoint AI Platform Extensibility Lead @ Microsoft
029 | Inside PnPjs: Open Source at Enterprise Scale with the Library Maintainers
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