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Julia Furst Morgado, Independent DevRel

We need more contributors

— My OSS Story —

NOVEMBER 10, 2022

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A little bit about me…

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Go subscribe to my Youtube channel! https://www.youtube.com/juliafmorgado

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From brazil

carnival,
favelas,
amazon forest
Went to Law School and worked as an attorney
Then decided to moved to US where I attended a Business program at UC Berkeley
I started my professional career here in the US working in marketing roles.
My most recent role, for the past 2 ½ years had me working closely to software and devops engineers at an IT company where I
Helped streamline their documentation
Did some Web design and web development to modernize their website. And collaborated on projects with big Tech companies such as
Microsoft and
IBM.
My interaction with these projects piqued my interest in exploring the industry for myself. During pandemic I attended a coding program offered by Stanford, called Code in Place, which taught the fundamentals of computer programming using Python
After the first program, I continued my learning journey through 100Devs, an online coding bootcamp taught by Leon Noel (shoutout to Leon)! If you wanna learn more about it check out my video on youtube.
I am really into learning in public (explain) so I started streaming on twitch, writing blog posts and making Youtube videos. I then became
an AWS community builder and
a Girl code ambassador.
Honestly, I found in tech a strong sense of community, that I had never felt before. One of my most fulfilling activities is running meetings with other folks in tech. I organize a biweekly meetup here in NYC, a meetup in Lisbon and I try to meet people Everywhere I go.

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WHY IS OPEN SOURCE SO USEFUL ?

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Ok, so that's a bit about me. Let's talk about Open Source now.

Why is it so useful?

Why don't we use an analogy to understand it better?

Think about your grandma’s pie.

You go to her house, and she feeds you some pie. You said “Wow Grandma, this is so good!”

So she writes out a copy of the recipe so that you can make it at home.

You decide to make her pie at home, and when a friend comes over you feed them some, and they say “Wow this is so good!” So you give them a copy of the recipe. And another slice.�Now your friend also has the recipe and he's able to improve it and make an even better pie! In our scenario they would share the recipe with others and everyone would improve the recipe together.

Open Source is a useful way to treat software, because like your grandmother’s pie, everyone can have a taste and help improve it.

But in order to improve it we need contributors, friends willing to taste our pie and try to make it better.

Just looking at that picture of pie makes me want pie, you know what I mean?

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Have you ever contributed to an

Open Source project?

Scan the QR code to give your answer!

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Why isn't everyone contributing to open source?

Scan the QR code and let us know your opinion!

https://app.sli.do/event/7SMkLevcW47Fx8adoQxRdC

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Poll on Twitter

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Blockers contributors face & tips for overcoming them

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#1 How to start contributing

Go watch it on Youtube!

https://www.youtube.com/juliafmorgado

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#2 Not seeing many beginner issues

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#2 Not seeing many beginner issues

For first-time contributors, I would recommend

Looking at issues labeled as “first-timers-only”, “good first issue” and “help wanted”, since these are usually used to indicate that the issues are beginner friendly. Good first issues.dev and goodfirstissues.com can be good places to filter issues as well.
Although these labels can be helpful don’t limit yourself to them, because some issues may not have these labels but are still doable for you. Look also for documentation issues or translation if you speak another language, they might be easier to start with. You can always propose new issues, and if If you can’t find issues that you feel you can solve for the project you’re looking into, try to look at other projects for you to begin with.

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#3 Not being confident with your skills

You can contribute with:

Knowledge base (documentation, blogs, case studies, tutorials…)
Translation
Graphic Design
Improving the UX/UI
Fixing typos
Reporting bugs

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#3 Not being confident with your skills

Confidence comes with time and no one knows everything.

Being a software developer, I wanted to take off running by contributing with actual code, but my first contribution consisted of translating documentation from English to Portuguese and French.

Even though this wasn’t a feature added to a project in the form of code, my contribution was useful because having the software available in local languages that people are more comfortable with, lowers the barrier to entry not only for users, but for contributors as well.

So keep in mind that contributions come in many shapes.

Having said this, I think you can start small while building up your confidence as you start contributing. Even small changes are valid contributions to advance a project.

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#4 Some projects seem too intimidating

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#4 Some projects seem too intimidating

I totally understand this, there are projects in Open Source, that I don’t feel prepared to look into, as much as I might have the curiosity to.

Ideally projects have a good documentation to help you with that, so look out for the documentation on the repository, discussions on forums or on the issues comments’ section. Documentation can be scattered in multiple places.

Also, it takes time to understand a project you never worked on, you may have to spend some time looking into the code and setting it up to understand the project.

Besides looking into the available Documentation, if you really feel stuck, you can always reach out to the community and maintainers from the project, so that they can provide resources to better understand the project.

When in doubt, ask away, there are no dumb questions. Essentially, you’re there to collaborate so respect is important. Open source participants tend to be diverse in every possible way, stay open-minded and considerate.

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#5 Lack of time to contribute

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#5 Lack of time to contribute

Everyone has their own lives going on, with their own commitments. You have to think about how much you want to be involved with Open Source, and the “why”. Is it even worth your time contributing to a specific project? Is it to give back to a project you care about? How much time can you actually give for this? What are your motivations? After you understand these you’ll have to think about how to incorporate this into your schedule and how to prioritize this.

Start with baby steps, both on the time, and the task you’ll work on. You can try to allocate some time to work on Open Source projects per week (like 1 to 2 hours on Sundays, or 1 hour every day, …). You can also start working on low effort issues like I did for my first contributions. This will help you get acquainted with the open source workflow (e.g.: fork -> clone -> work -> submit pull request) and help you get into a habit.

For me, it really helps to contribute to something I care about and want to see grow.

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#6 What if I can’t finish something I've committed myself to?

Give it your best but don't stress!

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Lastly, this blocker is a

Maybe you’ve committed to work on an issue and then you aren’t able to finish it, either because you lost interest for the issue, or don’t have the time anymore to finish it, or even you realized the issue is not for your current skill level… no matter the reason, it can happen.

If you’re getting initially stuck in the issue you’re trying to solve, it helps to ask questions to the community and read the documentation available to you.

If you really feel like you have to give up on it, don’t just abandon it. Give notice to projects owners, maintainers and the community, that you won’t be working on it anymore, thus giving the opportunity to someone else to solve it. You can let them know by leaving comments on the issue you committed to. This is totally OK! Also if you already have some work on it that can help the next contributor, share that. By doing this, you’ll make the maintainer’s life easier, because it will be a good headstart for anyone that takes that issue.

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Help build a community that encourages people to use, contribute to, and evangelize OSS projects

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Set the project up for success

A welcoming community is an investment into the project’s future and reputation. If the project is just starting to see its first contributions, start by giving early contributors a positive experience, and make it easy for them to keep coming back.

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Make people feel welcome

“There is a common misconception that you need to be a developer to participate in open source. That’s a barrier in itself, and an opportunity to expand how we bring people in by targeting a wider range of roles.”

— Neisha Fredericks, Allyship Consultant and Operations Manager of the Open Source Program Office at Red Hat (via Linux Foundation Diversity Report 2021)

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Especially underrepresented groups

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Most of the open source community believes it is a welcoming place, but people from disproportionately underrepresented groups are much more likely to feel otherwise.

A study by The Linux Foundation‘s 2021 “Report on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Open Source” shows that 82% of contributors to Open Source identify as men.

Additionally information from the report shows that the majority are young white males from upper-middle-class backgrounds with the privileges that allow them to spend their spare time, or even paid time, on open source projects. Clearly that privilege doesn’t extend to the average single mother of two, or person of colour who couldn’t land a job in IT, despite the qualification.

Marginalized people in tech - women, people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, and others - have less free time for obvious major reasons: dependent care, domestic work and errands, and pay inequity.

This lack of inclusivity is one of the main reasons why we have spare talent that isn’t participating in Open Source projects.

A way out of this would be if people were fairly compensated for working on open source projects, because their time needs to be paid for. (I'll address this better in the next slide).

Another reason is that gender, racial and sexual orientation biases are still prevalent in today’s open source world, as well as throughout the industry. We need to:

Create and support safe spaces for women and other marginalized people in OSS
Create and enforce Code of conducts
Engage women and others underrepresented individuals in OSS governance
Facilitate more intentional mentoring and networking opportunities
Use Gender-Neutral Pronouns

If open source is the predominant way the future is being built — with 90% of businesses using at least some OSS — then it is dangerously excluding the majority of its users from building and training that future. We already know that voice recognition software is worse at recognizing higher voices — even though most virtual assistants are femme by default.

And facial recognition software ranges from beheading Black people on Twitter and Zoom to inaccurately identifying dark-skinned women a third of the time. Stuff like this continues to happen because the developers of software and the data they are training on are dangerously un-diverse. You can’t build solutions for marginalized groups if they are excluded from the creation.

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Donate and sponsor projects

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Some people cannot afford to spend unpaid time on open source projects, based on their current financial position, debt, family or other caretaking obligations. That means the world never sees contributions from talented people who can’t afford to volunteer their time. This has ethical implications, since work that is done is biased in favor of those who already have advantages in life, who then gain additional advantages based on their volunteer contributions, while others who are not able to volunteer then don’t get later opportunities, reinforcing the current lack of diversity in the open source community.

What can be done about this?

Sponsor Open Source projects and contributors:

Flattr is a platform that has you set a budget for a month, then divides that money between the individuals or projects you choose.
Patreon is a membership platform that enables people to support projects with monthly subscriptions.

Some open source projects provide other donation/support frameworks from the GitHub page or you can just contact the maintainers/owners and ask how you can help financially.

Make Open Source part of your company's culture: consider giving your employees time to contribute to a project during business hours. This could mean encouraging them to submit patches to projects they regularly use, participate in weekly discussions, read mailing lists, write documentation - however they feel most comfortable contributing.
Support programs that pay new people to contribute to open source

Google Summer of Code is a global, online program focused on bringing new contributors into open source software development.
https://navendu.me/posts/open-source-internship-programs/

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Make sure maintainers don't burn out

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Ask any open source project maintainer, and they will tell you about the reality of the amount of work that goes into managing a project. There are always people waiting on them. They are fixing issues, creating new features, reviewing PRs. These all become a real demand on their time.

There are a lot of folks willing to consume, but with maintenance comes support, documentation, and all the other stuff that consumers assume will “just be there” but also takes time to generate. And, of course, there are the vocal minority who feel entitled to things and get attitudes…

I see two strong solutions to this problem…

Pay the maintainers or
When you depend on something, take part in actually maintaining it.

Newcomers are often discouraged by having to wait a long time to get feedback on their PRs but sometimes it's just not feasible.

It's important to be patient and treat everyone with respect.

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Don’t tolerate bad actors

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Share experiences and answer questions

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Create a friendly README.md

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Explain how to contribute

https://kubernetes.io/docs/contribute/

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Create a great README.md

Overview of the project

How to install and use it

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My first KubeCon experience!!

OCTOBER 24 - 28

Detroit, MI

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Day 0

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Starting on Sunday, I went to an event called Cloud Native Rejekts.
It is the b-side conference giving a second chance to the many wonderful, but rejected, talks leading into KubeCon.
Honestly it was one of the best events I went to because I spent the day learning super fresh topics.
Some were very enlightening(like Kubernetes RBAC, virtual kubernetes clusters)
and some I didn't really understand much (eBPF) but it gave me the opportunity to ask questions to the speaker and level up my knowledge.
Since it was a smaller event it gave me ample amount of time to network with the speakers and other people attending it.
Following the event we all went to have dinner together.
KubeCon hadn't even started and I had already made many new friends, and got a ton of perspective and insightful advice!

So it wasn't just the good food that made me appreciate the day.

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Day 1

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Day 1 and Day 2 of KubeCon usually consist of different co-located events.

Co-located events are add-on events to the main KubeCon activities and focus on a specific topic.
For the first day, I was particularly interested in attending the "Kubernetes workshop hosted by KubeCampus".
It was an excellent event, their hands on lab helped me understand some of the concepts better and gave me the chance to talk to industry experts.

To make the most out of these workshop style events I would suggest you try and do two things beforehand which worked quite well for me:

Try doing some of your own research about the project before attending the tutorial, even if you plan to attend a beginner level talk you should still try and follow some getting started guides by the project
Just for yourself try listing a couple bullet points about what you aim to get from the talk or you could also practice this as a whole for one of the co-located events and review this list after the workshop is over

After the workshop, I attended a Project Office Hours on the LitmusChaos project. These kinds of discussion events not only allow you to learn more about the project but also ask questions, meet the maintainers, learn about new features and upcoming updates.

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Day 2

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On day 2 in the morning

I went to OTel Unplugged, where I learned more about observability, operating the OpenTelemetry Collector, discussing about OpenTelemetry Metrics and how to get started with them.
This event had a completely different vibe, it was more informal with a ton of discussion. Two highlights of the event were that I got to interact with the maintainers of the project
and got two cute tattoos! (temporary of course)

In the afternoon I went to the Cloud Native Data Management Day

that was held at the hockey arena in Detroit.
There, I watched diverse sessions like Rishit explaining the machine learning deployment stages and introducing TensorFlow extended,
the CIVO team talking about the challenges of running #Kubernetes Storage Drivers on Hyper-Converged hardware,
and Shivay giving an introduction to different types of cloud architectures, and explaining how SODA Multicloud Architecture works.
I even won a ticket to my first ever hockey game!

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Day 3

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Day 3, 4 and 5 were when the main conference really happened.

I was looking forward to hearing Priyanka Sharma open the conference
(luckily I got to sit in the first row!)
Oh yeah, I think some people were tired lol.

To be honest I didn't watch many of the talks because I knew they were going to be recorded but instead I prioritized going to

Q&A sessions, project office hours and
staying more at the sponsor showcase area.

It is a great way for one to meet other developers and people in the industry,
discover new technologies,
brainstorm project ideas,
get some sweet swag
and even meet celebrities, jk.
You could also have some fun in this area with some stalls like GitLab with their Virtual Reality racing stall and multiple other games.
Unlike what you would make from the name, most of the stalls in the sponsor showcase area are actually manned by developers who are super excited to discuss projects you are making, show you some live demos, and also give you advice – making the sponsor showcase even better.

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Go watch it on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/juliafmorgado

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Honestly speaking, I didn't know what to expect from KubeCon but it really blew my mind. Spending almost a week, interacting with like-minded people all day, getting inspired about new projects, identifying potential projects to use and contribute, all while having fun was incredible! Kubecon is a great place for maintainers to meet future contributors as well,

especially with the projects booth pavilion
and the maintainers track.

I was able to expand my understanding of industry best practices and fresh trends in the quickly developing cloud native ecosystem.

The conference gave me the opportunity to network with business, technology leaders and important maintainers of the most well-known projects in the cloud native ecosystem.

Something you should definitely try at conferences is to go outside your comfort zone, there is probably a technology you might have not worked with or an area of development you had never explored, KubeCon is the place for you to attend a session and see if it interests you or just come back with a decent knowledge of the technology.

ALso, don’t be afraid to just go up and say Hi to others. It is very likely that you might meet folks who have different perspectives, you should be open to unlearning or relearning to grow yourself, just have an open mindset.

Meanwhile you can help yourself (and help me) by checking out my vlog of KubeCon on my youtube channel. Make sure to subscribe and drop a message in the comments

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Not tomorrow, NOW is the right time for you to be a part of the open-source community and start contributing if you aren’t already.

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@juliafmorgado

www.juliafmorgado.com

THANK YOU

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