Anyone Can Be an Open Source Maintainer

Hi, everyone. My name is Brittany Joyner and I'm here to talk to you today about how anyone can be an open source maintainer. And just to tell you a little bit more about myself, I'm based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, here in the USA. I used to work in marketing and then I learned how to code because I wanted to become a developer. And now I'm bringing all of that together as head of developer relations at Pixie Bricks. So that's what I'm doing.

But why am I here today talking about open source maintenance? How did I become an open source maintainer and what does that mean? I'm going to take you on a little journey first. So we're going to go back in time, back to pre pandemic, pre wearing a mask and having to social distance and all of that. We're going to go back to 2019, October of 2019 with Hacktoberfest. And this, if you haven't heard of before, Hacktoberfest is basically an annual event where open source developers come together and contribute on projects together. It's quite fun. This was my first one in 2019. And it was a really impactful experience for me, because that's when I was just learning to code and I was starting to starting to do a little bit of stuff, but I was very intimidated by Git and by like contributing to projects with other people. And I like I knew how to build something with HTML and JavaScript and CSS on my own site, but how do I like work with other people with that? And that's when Hacktoberfest really kind of helped me come out of my shell and realize that, oh, I don't have to be a senior developer to do this, like, and the community is so friendly to help and be like, oh, no worries, here's how you launch a PR like, no worries, here's how you know, you can change this or that. And it was just a really eye opening experience for me that helped me really, first of all, understand more about like collaborating with Other developers, which is something I was going to need in my first full time role. And it was also a way of just seeing that, oh, cool, like, we can build cool stuff together. Fast forward to 222. Last year, I had a coding job working full time as an engineer, and I was on leadership for my LGBTQ plus erg employee resource group at elastic. And basically, we were hosting an event. And it was going to be like a mini conference where different members could give talks about things that are interesting to them. And so I put together a website using my coding skills. I made a cool little like event website that showed an agenda and talks and things we were doing. And it was really cool. Everybody really liked the site. It was awesome. And I kind of thought, huh, I wonder if other people might want to use this. It could be a good template for an event website where they don't have to code it all from scratch. They can just like swap out the content and be good to go. And so fast forward to that October of the same year, I decided to make my repo public so others could join in and help improve. And hopefully join in the Hacktober Fest stuff and get some more contributors.

And that's kind of how I ended up here today. But it wasn't as simple as that. And I was sitting here thinking, wow, like this is not at all what I thought it was going to be like to maintain a project, a public repo that other people could contribute to. And so I want to share with you some of the expectations verse reality of maintaining that open source project.

My first expectation was that, oh, I've got to be a senior developer. I'm going to have some really tough coding questions come in here. And it's going to be like way over my head. And I've got to be a big, fancy open source person. The truth is, I actually used more organizational and communication skills than I did my developer skills. Because you're really just kind of coordinating people who are coming in to help with things. They're doing the work. You're trying to coach as you can, for sure. But there's definitely a lot more of organization and keeping people aligned.

Next, I thought it was going to be a solo sport. I was like, OK, I'm going to be a maintainer. I'm gonna have to answer all these questions. I'm gonna have to figure out, you know, when people have bugs, what's going on. But actually, I found that a lot of people were willing to help. Even at my company, when I would say, hey, I've got a contributor who's working on this, there were people on my team who weren't even, you know, affiliated with my project that were still willing to say, oh, I think they might be stuck with this, or have they thought about trying this? And even different contributors ended up jumping in and helping each other with stuff. So it was really awesome to see that.

Lastly, I thought nobody would find my project. I thought it was just going to be like people walking into like an empty room. Like there was nothing there. But especially being able to jump on to the hype train of Hacktoberfest, I had so many people coming to help me with my project. So many people were jumping into the repo, coming up with feature ideas, grabbing issues that I'd made for bugs. And it was, like, so exciting to see that it almost became overwhelming, because I was constantly having to monitor, like, oh, somebody wants this issue. Oh, somebody needs a new issue. So I think that was a good problem to have. So a couple of benefits if you're still on the fence. Should I participate? Should I be an open source maintainer? I'd say you totally should.

Because, first of all, it's going to give you confidence. I gained so much confidence in my skills as a developer and just being able to contribute with others. You're going to get connections. You're going to make friends, right? There's some people who contributed to my project that I still message with on Twitter. And we still hang out and help each other out with stuff. And then lastly, we're all going to get more cool tools. Isn't that great? Think about all of the tools that you use. What if someone had been, like, mm, I'm just going to keep that tucked away in my own private repo. I'm going to wait until I have free time to add the features I want. Yeah, no, I don't think I'm going to share that just yet. If that had happened, think about how many fewer cool tools we'd have in the world today.

So if I can leave you with one thing. If you've built something that you think others could use and maybe could also be improved, make it public and become an open source maintainer.

So that's all for today. Thank you so much for joining. My name is Brittany. If you want to chat, you can reach me on Twitter. My username is Brit underscore Joiner. Got it right there in the corner.