Josh Dzielak – Welcome Home! How The Best Projects Lower The Contribution Barrier

Our next presenter is Josh Dzielak. Josh is CTO and co-founder of Orbit. Josh's presentation is titled Welcome Home!

How the Best Projects Lower the Contribution Barrier. I'm really excited to hear that Josh is going to be sharing some of his experiences on how to provide contributors to be and new contributors the information they need to be welcomed and successful in your community. I hope you enjoyed the presentation.

Hello, I hope you're enjoying GitLab Commit and the everyone can contribute. So far, I do truly believe that everyone has something to contribute to open source. But I also know that making that contribution isn't always easy.

Today, I'm going to talk about what projects can do to lower their contribution barriers, be more welcoming and give their contributors a great experience. First, a little bit about me. My name is Josh Dzielak, I'm a software engineer and developer advocate from the US, but today I live in Paris and I'm also the co-founder and CTO of a company called Orbit at Orbit.

We build tools for developer advocates and community teams that help them get data about their community, make better decisions and show ROI to their leadership. We work with companies like CirclecCI, TypeForm and Apollo, and the idea of community and contributor experience is really near and dear to our hearts. Let me ask you, have you ever landed on a project documentation or shown up in their discord or slack community and felt intimidated, maybe uncertain of what to do?

Well, that's because contributor experience has a pineapple problem. From the outside, a pineapple, a sharp pokey and very hard to open. But once you're inside the pineapple, it's delicious, full of vitamins and very hydrating.

This quote from Google Open source helps us understand why this is. It can be intimidating to contribute to free and open source software projects with so many unknowns, the tools, process, culture and more, and not to mention sharing one's own work with the world. Any of those things on their own can be scary enough.

But when you put them together, you can start to see why barriers form. Opensource project owners and maintainers know that this is an issue even for the projects themselves, developing and sustaining a healthy community of contributors is critical to scaling the project and growing the ecosystem. We need to ensure our contributors are happy and productive and that there are not bottlenecks hindering the project.

That's a quote from the Kubernetes contributor Experience Special Interest Group, or ContribX. And I have to say, it's pretty awesome to see a project, to have a group just dedicated to contribute or experience. Opensource contributions, even little ones, can have a big impact on someone's life.

Kent C Dodds is a prolific open source maintainer today with tens of thousands of stars across many different repositories. But how did it all start? With one small typo fix.

And of that moment, Kent says, I got over one of the hardest hurdles in opensource, the first contribution. And if this isn't a great argument for making it easier for folks to grab that first contribution, I don't know what is. Now, here's one last quote, this time from Brian Douglas.

The developer advocate GitHub and an open source project maintainer himself. js Or some other framework or a library, I have so much more information and an advantage because I happen to be in the right room at the right time. Unintentional gatekeeping is a way that we might be putting up barriers to project contribution without realizing it.

Now, at Orbit, we think of the moment of welcoming as the first really important milestone in a commuter community members journey and in the contributor experience, first impressions really matter, and they set the tone for everything to follow. Not all welcomes are equal, of course. So let's look at a few different welcoming styles and see if we recognize any of them in opensource.

This is welcome A. If you've spent any time in open source,Welcome A will not be that unfamiliar. Nor will Welcome B.

Hero's welcome C, I like this one. I think it's better. I really don't know what a muskox is, but it must be a special animal.

Now, I'd like to share some practical ways that open source projects are making contributor's feel really welcome and excited to contribute, and these are tips that almost any project can use to make a great first impression. Gatsby is an open source way to build modern websites based on reactant graphQL. Gatsby boasts nearly thirty five hundred contributors today, which is awesome.

So they must be doing something right? Yeah, well, in fact, they are they have a detailed step by step guide for contributing to the project, which helps knock down barriers around tools and process. Then they reduce the culture barrier by recognizing contribution in a fun way with something called The Gatsot.

Gatsbot is a bot that offers every new contributor some Gatsby swag once their first request has been merged. Here's another project, Fedora, the Linux distribution. I happen to know that Fedora is migrating to GitLab later this year and several of the reasons that they cite include usability and accessibility to contributor's.

Fedora has this very cool interactive site. com? It's a step by step quiz that helps me a future contributor.

See where the project's needs intersect with my own talents. Am I am I a developer? A designer?

This wizard will guide me toward the right contribution path. Now, I want to talk about GitLab for a second. GitLab, really values contributor experience, and they have two initiatives that I want to call out that I think other projects could learn from.

The first is the good four new contributors label for issues. This helps me, as a new contributor, find something to work on that's appropriate for my experience. And even better, each issue with this label must have a mentor associated with it.

So that way I know who I can reach out to if I need help. I think this is a fantastic idea that a lot of other projects can learn from. Next, after I've made my contribution, a very cool thing happens, I get a mug which says my first MR merged with a hashtag right on it.

And if you search Twitter for this hashtag, you'll see lots of very happy and caffeinated developers. I can't wait to receive mine. dev From the thoughtful folks at DeepSource.

We believe getting developers to fix super easy issues removes the barrier for future contributions. This is why Good First Issue exists. And if we think back to the example I shared earlier with Kent C Dodds, just fixing a typo is what got him into open source in the first place, starting a long and very prolific career.

So what is this project Good First Issue do? Well, it culls issues from a configured set of repositories that are labeled good first issue and it turns them into a browser list. If you want to add one of your repositories, you can you can just edit a repository yamml file in in the repository and then make a merge request.

After that, your issues will be automatically scanned and then shown up on the website. Last but not least, I want to show you a project by Brian Douglas, who I quoted earlier. Brian is one of our favorite community members that Orbit, and he was the first guest on our new podcast, Developer Love.

The project is called Open Sauced, and it's all about getting new folks interested in and confident about contributing to open source as part of this effort. Brian streams his own contributions to open source on Twitch so that other developers can watch it and see what he can see what he does. He also hosts a Discord server where people can ask questions, they can ask for help.

to sharing with some of those contribution opportunities are. So Brian is both supporting people and providing tooling and process around around getting people from nothing to their first opensource contribution. And so that's it for me today, if you're an opesource project maintainer, I hope you've been inspired to try some of the ideas here to make your project more contributor friendly.

And if you're looking to contribute, you've got some resources to help you get started down that path. Personally, I'm always helpful or always happy to help out future contributors. You can reach me on Twitter any time at @Dzello, that's my handle.

And if I can do anything to help you get started in opesource, don't hesitate to reach out. Thank you very much for your time and please enjoy the rest of GitLab Commit. Thank you.