phildini.dev
Tips for Becoming a Core Contributor
During the PyCon 2016 Sprints, I was made a Core Contributor to the BeeWare project, and was given the ‘commit bit’ on Batavia, an implementation of the Python virtual machine written in Javascript. A friend of mine who works with the PDX PyLadies and regularly encourages people to contribute to Open Source saw this, and asked that I write a blog post on becoming a Core Contributor to Open Source projects.
It’s true that, for many projects, how you become a Core Contributor can seem mysterious. It often seems unclear what a Core Contributor even does, and it doesn’t help that each Open Source project has a slightly different definition of the responsibilities of a Core Contributor.
So this deliberately isn’t a “How to Become a Core Contributor” guide. It would be impossible to write such a guide and be definitive. This is me trying to reverse engineer how I became a Core Contributor on BeeWare and then extracting out things I think are good behaviors for getting to that stage.
How I Became a Core Contributor to BeeWare:
Met Russell Keith-Magee at DjangoCon EU 2016, where he spoke about BeeWare and Batavia.
Chatted with Russell about BeeWare, sprinted some on Batavia at DjangoCon EU 2016.
Saw Russell and Katie McLaughlin at PyCon 2016, chatted more about BeeWare with both of them, joined the BeeWare sprint.
Recognized that BeeWare had some needs I could fill, namely helping onboard new people and reviewing Pull Requests.
Asked Russell for, and received, the ‘commit bit’ on the Batavia project so I could help review and merge PRs.
Tips I Can Give Based on My Experience:
Be excited about the project and the project’s future. I think the whole BeeWare suite has amazing potential for pushing Python to limits it hasn’t really reached before, and I want to see it succeed. A Core Contributor is a caretaker of a project’s future, and should be excited about what the future holds for project.
Be active in the community. Go to conferences and meetups when you can, join the mailing lists and IRC channels, follow the project and the project maintainers on Twitter. I met Russell and Katie at a conference, then kept in touch via various IRC and twitter channels, then hung out with them again at another conference. Along the way, I was tracking BeeWare and helping where I could.
Be friendly with the existing project maintainers and Core Contributors. It’s less likely I would be a Core Contributor if I wasn’t friends with Russell and Katie, but the way we all became friends was by being active in the community around Python, Django, and BeeWare. One way to figure out if you want to be a Core Contributor on a project is to see which projects and project maintainers you gravitate towards at meetups and conferences. If there’s a personality match, you’re more likely to have a good time. If you find yourself getting frustrated with the existing Core Contributors that’s probably a sign you’ll be more frustrated than happy as a Core Contributor to that project. It’s totally fine to walk away, or find other ways to contribute.
Focus on unblocking others. I still make individual code contributions to BeeWare projects, but I prioritize reviewing and merging pull requests, and helping out others in the community. From what I’ve seen, a Core Contributor’s time is mainly one of: Triaging issues in the issue tracker, reviewing patches or pull requests, and helping others. It’s only when everyone else is unblocked that I start looking at my own code contributions.
Have fun. I asked to become a Core Contributor to BeeWare because I enjoy the community, enjoy Russell’s philosophy on bringing on newcomers, and think the project itself is really neat. If you’re having fun, it’s obvious, and most Core Contributors want to promote the people who are on fire for a project.
My hope is that I have made becoming a Core Contributor to an Open Source project seem achievable. It is completely achievable, no matter your current skill level. There’s a lot more detail I didn’t cover here, and I can’t promise that if you do all these things you’ll become a Core Contributor, even on the BeeWare project. When you ask to become a Core Contributor to a project, the existing project maintainers are evaluating all kinds of things, like how active you are, how well you might mesh with the existing team, and what existing contributions you’ve made to the project and the community. It might not be a great fit, but it doesn’t mean you’re not a great person.
What I can say is that being a Core Contributor is work, hard work, but incredibly rewarding. Seeing someone make their first contribution, and helping shepherd that contribution to acceptance, is more rewarding for me than making individual contributions. Seeing a project grow, seeing the community grow around a project, makes the work worth it.
If you want have questions about my experience, or about contributing to Open Source in general, I’m happy to answer questions in the comments, or on twitter @phildini, or email [[email protected]]](mailto:[email protected]).