My PR has been waiting a year, or the exponential curve behind open source backlogs
Summary
The article applies queuing theory and Little's Law to explain why open source PR backlogs grow and how bottlenecks emerge when review capacity is overwhelmed. It offers practical, automation-friendly strategies to improve flow without adding maintainers, including limiting PR size, gating quality, limiting work in progress, prioritizing by value, setting a cadence, building reviewer tiers, and requiring feature proposals.