Editor's Note: We're celebrating February 3rd, the day the term "Open Source" was first coined, as World Open Source Day here at Sonatype by recognizing our incredible maintainers and contributors, and the open source projects they support. Read all about Paul Horton's journey below.
My first (real) open source contribution was some typo fixes in a readme file.
As per most, I'm a self-taught techie. I've done development throughout my career, among many other things. However, as I joined Sonatype there was a "hey, we need help" for CycloneDX Python tooling - and I enjoy writing in Python. Make no mistake - I'm no Python guru (far from it!), but the projects needed some help. It was interesting, and I felt able to help - so I did.
Never looked back. I've learned so much, and also met a bunch of great people (virtually) on the journey.
Consistency - and being present. One-off contributions are of course helpful, but consistency within a project or area really helps. You bring more than just your coding skills - you become an expert in the project and related material, which only leads to a better project.
Loads. Documentation is an easy one, but what I love to see as a maintainer is real users of the projects, raising ideas and requests for new features or fixes, and then engaging with us to work out the right way forward.
More Python?
Absolutely. If this was a commercial venture, you'd think about your customer's needs. In open source, your customer is potentially everyone.
To me, this means we have to:
Document well
Take all feedback with grace - what is obvious to you as a Maintainer, clearly wasn't - so we can do better
Be collaborative - open source is about the community anyway!
Be good custodians - open source doesn't (generally) benefit from Software Architects and Teams of highly paid engineers, but we can still try to ensure a project retains its key focus and purpose
Key people who've helped me: