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Tyler Williams
@coolsoftware.dev

Open source is more fun with friends. If you don't have the time or energy to contribute yourself, I have a way for you to live vicariously: sponsor me on GitHub and I'll send you updates about what I'm working on. I'll also take feedback on what *you* think I should work on.

Tyler Williams
@coolsoftware.dev

I do about 5-10 hours per week of open source work on my own time. These days, I'm doing work in the MobX ecosystem, trying to prepare for us React Compiler compatibility. But when I want a break from that, I dig through React Native community repos and pitch in wherever I can.

Alyssa DiCarlo
@techlyss.bsky.social

How did you get into contributing to open source projects? I’m sure I speak for a lot of people when I say it’s hard to figure out where to contribute. And even when an opportunity seems promising, it’s tough to know if my contribution is even needed or part of the vision of the project.

Tyler Williams
@coolsoftware.dev

The short answer is: I struggled with that for a long time, I still do, and I got lucky a few years ago when @jamon.dev presented me with an opportunity to take a leadership role in MobX-State-Tree, which helped me build up some intuition and resilience.

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Tyler Williams
@coolsoftware.dev

But here's a longer answer: Probably my first real open source was building this Markdown plugin for Eleventy: github.com/coolsoftware... Plugins for a popular tool are a good starting point, because you have no dependencies on other people, but there's a good chance you'll get users.

github.comGitHub - coolsoftwaretyler/eleventy-plugin-markdown-shortcode: Eleventy plugin to add a markdown shortcodeEleventy plugin to add a markdown shortcode. Contribute to coolsoftwaretyler/eleventy-plugin-markdown-shortcode development by creating an account on GitHub.
Tyler Williams
@coolsoftware.dev

After that, I kind of got the bug. I hit a problem with an open source project and opened a PR out of the blue: github.com/rbren/rss-pa... The maintainer was very receptive. I wish I had a good permalink, but I think there were actually some people on Twitter who were critical about my code.

github.commanually set timeout to catch ECONNREFUSED in parser by coolsoftwaretyler · Pull Request #146 · rbren/rss-parserTrying to solve #146 The first thing I did was try and swap out the working localhost connection for a url I knew was failing with ECONNREFUSED. The test suite started failing like this: 3) Parser ...
Tyler Williams
@coolsoftware.dev

It was not very fun. The maintainer was totally cool, but doing stuff in public is scary. Especially if you just jump right in to the code part. All the things you said (not sure about direction or if your contribution is even wanted) come at you fast when you just send code