Post

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.

For Black Friday, I'm readjusting my GitHub sponsor goals. Instead of targeting specific dollar amounts, I've changed my goal to 10 monthly sponsors (any dollar amount). github.com/sponsors/coo...

If you contribute any dollar amount on any cadence, I'll be happy to add you to a private, bi-weekly newsletter about what I'm up to in open source (entirely opt-in).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I was a little quiet in open source after that. I felt pretty discouraged. But I found a better entrypoint: answering questions about technology that I use.

I was using MobX-State-Tree every day. I joined the Infinite Red Slack, which had an MST channel. Then I just started answering any question I saw about MST - even if I didn't know the answer at first (I would do research).

This is part of why @jamon.dev reached out to me about taking on a maintainer role in MST. I had shipped 0 PRs, but been very publicly helpful.

So I told him what I would do is spend another couple months answering GitHub issues and discussion posts, instead of just the Slack channel. If I was able to consistently answer questions in GitHub for that period of time and balance my time, I'd go all in.

So yeah, then every day/every other day, I just went through the backlog of issues and discussions and answered what I could, researched what I didn't know, or just acknowledged people who had been waiting a long time without a response.

From there, I stepped it up and got onboarded to the codebase. I've been a maintainer since. And being on *this side* of open source built up in my intuition about what maintainers want (they just want minimal reproductions and small PRs with tests).