There's More to Open Source than Code by Ramon Huidobro

Hello, let's talk about open source. And I'm gonna start with a story. One time, a dear friend of mine was looking around on the internet and found a post from the Node. js community saying that they had a great first issue on their GitHub to work on the Node. js project. And this person thought, ooh, I could do that. So they went right on their computer and started checking out the issue. But something happened. This person got stuck. Started asking some questions to themselves. What if somebody's already working on this? How do I even claim this issue and not make myself look silly? What if I take too long and I'm blocking someone? Or worse. What if my PR is no good?

And then I never did anything. Right, sorry, I should have mentioned it. was me. Who am I? Hi. My name is Ramon. Pronounce he him. I'm originally from Chile, living in Austria, co-founder of the Bad Website Club, developer relations strategy consultant. And just an avid and budding community member. It is such a joy to be speaking here at Django Con. And this topic is near and dear to my heart. And so I wanted to start by saying you might see the question oftentimes, well, how do I get started in open source? And there are some great resources out there for doing so. GitHub themselves have an opensource. guide that you might that you might be interested in. Or there's opensauce. pizza, a great way to find issues and projects to work on. But I also want to share how I got started in open source.

And in order to do that, I'm going to tell you a story about that time early in my career when I was working as a freelancer. And I was starting to feel a little bit lonely. This was, you know, I was still starting out. I was doing jobs for clients. But I came upon I came upon some projects and like I I thought like You know, I had that ex that it anxiety, that little feeling of being an imposter, of being like, ugh, I'm not sure I can contribute to this. But I found myself attending meetups and meeting people and finding other ways to contribute You might have heard of the Rails Girls Project, which still is a series of workshops around the world helping underrepresented folks get into tech by way of learning Ruby on Rails. And I started out by being a coach and finding issues. Let me tell ya

nothing teaches you something like, for example, how to install SQL Lite on Windows, quite like coaching at one of these events So doing things like this, finding ms finding typos and adding them to the blog uh to the resources, all of this stuff kind of helped me become more confident in how I contribute And that's how I found the Rails Girls Summer of Code project, which was kind of like Rails Girls except it was for helping folks around the world, and not just in Rails, start you know, getting into open source by contributing to existing projects with a crowdfunded stipend. And that was amazing. I was helping out. with organizing, I was helping out with helping folks connect. I was also contributing to

conferences. For example, in twenty eighteen I was part of the team that brought to you the European Ruby Conference in Austria. I've also found myself doing contributions here and there to Free Code Camp. I uh I very famously was on string on stream once and I was reading instructions and I literally stumbled into a typo. Which of course I made a pull request for. Nowadays I'm also contributing a lot to something called distribute aid where I'm helping, you know, set up a t a tech stack. to help folks work in their dis in their open source resources in order to help distribute human uh humanitarian aid Now you might have looked at those examples and thought, not a lot of this seems like code. And a lot of the time when we think of open source, we might think of, you know, green squares.

You know, we might think of commits on GitHub. But here's the thing. There are other ways. There are other ways to contribute to open source. These are called non-code contributions. And these are defined as, well, any contributions that don't involve code. And I want to argue that these are incredibly essential to not just the health of a project, but for us as a community And if you're already contributing to open source and through code, and think to yourself like, but why do I need this then? I, you know, already write code. Well, I'm gonna do that thing where I come back to the title. Eh? There's more to open source than code. And I like to think of this as kind of like open source beyond code.

You might be thinking, why? See, when we think of an open source project, sure, we let's say we've got our little box that has our code in it. But that box has a lot more than just the code. It's got a community around it. And not just a community around that project, a community around how that project fits with other open source projects. Which fair. You might think, okay, but why do non-code contributions? And I find that there's a couple of reasons that really have helped me become a better software developer as well as a community member. One of these is getting out of my comfort zone. I'm I'm a shy person. And being able to collaborate with people in

open source projects, again, through ways that don't involve me feeling self-conscious about my code, has really helped me take a step up and start contributing code. As said, you're helping a project thrive through ways that go beyond that code. Oftentimes, open source maintainers have a lot on their plate that goes beyond that code. on that code that involves needing to have contributions that come from other places. As somebody Hoping to get into this open source project by having non-code contributions, you're also making it easier for other folks to start contributing to that project as well. And really, going back to that whole shy thing. What a great way to get to know folks, to see who is participating in these projects, maybe meet some of your heroes if that's your thing, and really become and cement yourself as a member of that community.

So in this talk, I'm going to go through some types of non-code contributions. I'd love to hear from you as well. What are some that you think are really helpful? And you might have heard when I was talking about free code camp, documentation, absolutely valid and solid way to get into open source contributions. You know, for example, here's the distribute aid repo. We need to have ways so that folks can easily get up and running so that they can contribute to our software. And well, that needs documentation, that needs experience, that needs clear and correct out explanations of how we can do this. And I said this doesn't just have to be a README. Sometimes places like Free Code Camp have a fully dedicated open source contributors

site. How cool is that? And again, this doesn't even have to be related to the open source repositories themselves. Blogging is an incredibly helpful way to do that. It doesn't immediately get you GitHub squares per se. But for example, here I am writing about Vue. js and Vuex and simultaneously updating data across different browser screens. I'm kind of contributing to this open source ecosystem. Same could be said for trying stuff out. You know, a lot of the times have you all heard of the curse of knowledge where you're kind of you know so entrenched in what you're doing that you kind of forget what it's like to come into that project for a first time? Honestly, this happens to a lot of us, even in our daily day c And the same way happens for open source projects, where we say to ourselves, cool, I've run this on macOS, all is well.

But what happens when somebody tries to run your project in Windows Subsystem for Linux, for example? That's gonna run into some trouble. This turns into great ways to be like, hey, actually, I found a way to do this. Can I put this as an FAQ item on your README? How cool is that So let's talk about issue tree. You know, the art of making sure that the issues that are in a project are up to date, are relevant, and are being handled. Oftentimes, let's see for example this distributed one here, you can end up with a lot of issues on your open source project and oftentimes even overwhelmed to do it. And as a maintainer, this can be a lot to deal with But did you know it is totally acceptable and possible to contribute by helping manage these issues?

In fact, Kubernetes has a guide for triaging issues. More so, there's this great platform called Co-Triage that is all about helping to triage, manage those issues. Going from issues, we can talk about code reviews. I gotta tell you, some of my best learning, here's an example from my contribution to the Rails Girl Summer of Code project. I'm gonna tell ya, it was so helpful for somebody to really take the time to step by step and give me positive and constructive critique. Getting feedback can be a little bit scary. Let me tell ya, giving feedback just as much. But I I'm telling you, finding ways to help somebody improve their code and putting that thoughts to words also helps us understand our code better.

It's really handy. And again, doesn't have to be repositories. You can go outside of the world of the GitHub repository. And look at, for example, what questions are being asked. So here's an example from Stack Overflow where somebody's having some Docker issues By answering these questions, not only are you helping out this person, but every future person that comes and looks at this question and thinks like, oh yeah, I'm having this issue as well. And by the way, it's not just answering questions, it's also asking questions. A lot of times, a lot of people might have these questions and nobody's asked it yet Why not be the person that asks that question and gets people unblocked in, say, for example, an open source issue

You don't just have to contribute on the internet, you can also contribute in person. And yeah, volunteering at events is a huge way to propagate the knowledge and the health of an open source project For example, here's one of my favorite conferences in the world, RuJS, that takes place in Bochum, where I help as an MC, and it's such a gratifying way to see a community thrive. and grow. And hey, Bochum, Germany, yeah, not just in English. You can help with localizing You know, there's a ton of documentation out there, even documentation that we see on the day-to-day. Why not, if we speak a language other than English, take some of those skills and put them into, for example, how to Write up about CSS

container queries in Espanyol. And yeah, doesn't just have to be volunteering at you can also do your bit by organizing events And they don't just have to be conferences, mind you. They can be, for example, a meetup. This is a meetup that I've been helping organize here in Vienna, the Ruby meetup, for ages. And it's been just such a great way to bring people together and help folks understand not just their not just the Ruby project itself, but also projects around that ecosystem. But not just meetups, can also be hackathons, can also be um you know ensemble programming events. That's all we did at Distribute 8 and it was so gratifying to bring people together to try and help us build this website better.

Heck, doesn't even have to be writing, does it? It can be creating assets. We can bring in a bevy of skills. And for example, uh here I am trying to make a the famous Vienna's Ferris wheel for QueerJS a few months ago. Uh it was my first time using Figma. Hey, it was a contribution. Hey, I learned a lot. Hey, I help with that project. How cool is that? And yeah, giving talks is definitely part of that. That's what I'm doing here, aren't I? But it doesn't even have to be conference talks. It can be video content. It could be what I'm pre-recording here now. It can be live streams. Oh, let me tell ya. Back in my days at Code C I hosted a series of events where I would bring on open source maintainers and they would onboard me, hence the sa hence the sailor suit, to their open source project, having never looked at their code. This was an incredible experience.

Heck, it can even be social media. It can be content curation. What does that mean? For example, heck, you probably read some really cool newsletters. You can do some yourself, you know. You can help out with some project coordination. You can help out with some moderation. You can help out as a mentor. And hey, this can even be in the form of just helping out with career advice. My dear friend Jess runs these open advice one-on-ones and she has an open source repository for this. How cool is that? So cool. We've looked at a ton of ways to be able to contribute to open source beyond code. But as a code contributor, what can I do to facilitate these? And here's some ideas. First of all, establish a safe, inclusive, effective community.

You can't just say, okay, there's a code of conduct work or it, absolutely not. Code of conduct is only as good as it is enforced. Setting up a strategic way to be able to keep your community safe, inclusive, and effective is critical. Tagging your issues, not just good for beginners, but also in different ways that are needed. For example, art needed, uh, article needed, spell check needed, this sort of thing What we can also do is advocate for our community. And when I say community, I don't just mean developers. I mean everyone. And that also includes maintainers. Because just like code contributors, people get busy. It's important to keep that in mind.

Of course the tricky thing is, contributing beyond code might not get to green squares. So what can I do as a maintainer to make sure that that work is recognized? Well, well. Why not have a contributor's markdown file where when making your full when making your first pull request, you can also add your name to this file Or hey, there's even projects like the All Contributors specification that lets you list contributors to your project. Alright, friends, I've been going on for a while. Let's talk about some action items. Identifying problems. See where our contributions can be helpful. Make a solution. Make these proposals. I said open source, open issues, or PRs. Make sure that there's a way that when we make these contributions, if we want to, if we can, we can circle back for future contributions.

And it is important and imperative that we continue to practice open source etiquette. Of course, maintainers are busy people and they have lives as well. We need to respect those. So when you contribute beyond code, above all, be intentional, be strategic Here's some of the resources for this talk. I'm going to be posting some slides on socials as well. It has been such a joy to be with you here today. I want before we go, I want to recommend A book that you might be interested in. It's called Working in Public by Nadia Eggball. This is a fantastic read in seeing what open source software contributions look like today and what we can do But for now, I'll let you all have a wonderful rest of your conference.

Take care, everyone.