I had my first opportunity to be interviewed late 2023 about my involvement in the open-source community!

You can read the interview here

The team from infield.ai reached out and asked me a bunch of questions over a call, which has been transcribed on their substack newsletter called Once a Maintainer.

The discussion covered a range of topics, including my beginnings in coding, my initial interest in open-source projects, and my decision to re-engage with the community in 2022.

Some of the main takeaways I think are:

  1. Open-source projects offer valuable opportunities for learning and community engagement, even for beginners.
  2. Contributions to open-source can be diverse, ranging from coding to documentation and triaging tickets.
  3. A break from open-source contributions doesn’t prevent one from re-engaging and contributing meaningfully in the future.
  4. The catalyst for my renewed interest in contributing to open-source was inspired by reading Richard Schneeman’s book, “How to Open Source.”
  5. Applying structured approaches, like the COIL framework, can really help in successfully getting started contributing to open-source projects.
  6. My early interest in electronics helped lead to a passion for software development and programming. I imagine this is true of many out there!

We also take a trip down memory lane for me, where I touch on my early projects and the first open source projects I contributed to (eg Stendhal). I’ll be writing about that soon I hope.

In the interview I was also asked about who I think is doing interesting work in the Ruby community and I picked a few people who have really inspired me with their work.

Their contributions to the Ruby community are varied and interesting, I’m loving following and learning from their open-source efforts.