Meet an Open Source Contributor: Amy Keibler

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 Amy Keibler’s journey below. 

What was your journey to becoming an open source contributor? 

I enjoy trying out new technologies and new programming languages, so I’ve often encountered situations where the documentation isn’t quite up to date or example code doesn’t compile. In those situations, it’s usually pretty easy to open a quick pull request with a fix.

Beyond that, using open source libraries at work gave me the push to go further with contributions. After working around a particular JavaScript library behavior enough times, I decided to see if I could add a feature directly and then simplify my code. Thankfully, they had a good test suite, which gave me confidence that my changes were correct. That experience helped solidify to me that open source programs are not really different from the software we write at work every day and you don’t need to be a 10x wizard to participate.

What do you wish people understood about being a good contributor? 

Maintaining a software project is a lot of work. Maintainers wear the hat of Project Manager, Technical Architect, Infrastructure Engineer, QA Engineer, and other roles. If a project has a documented process for contributing, following it will reduce the work the maintainer has to do, which will make it more likely they will have time to review and include your changes.

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What non-code contributions are worth contributing?

Non-code contributions are incredibly important. My favorite example of atypical contributions is Rust error Twitter, where Esteban Küber will find people tweeting about confusing errors they get (Read more...)