How to Open Source with Richard Schneeman (@schneems)

hexdevs podcast episode: How to Open Source with Richard Schneeman

Stefanni Brasil , Thiago Araujo

What does lurking and flossing have to do with contributing to open source? It's all about sustaining tiny habits. Learn how to use tiny habits to go from coder to contributor.

How to Open Source with Richard Schneeman

What does lurking and flossing have to do with contributing to open source? It’s all about sustaining tiny habits.

Be a lurker and start small. Read a PR, try to understand what’s going on. Leave a thumbs up 👍 if you like it. This is a very easy way to get started. And build a habit out of that. – schneems

How to Open Source: Learn the secrets of successful contributors

Recently, Richard published the book “How to Open Source: Learn the secrets of successful contributors”. The missing handbook will guide you from making your first contribution to building a sustainable practice.

Listen to and watch our conversation with Richard Schneeman (@schneems) about the book, and how to go from coder to contributor.

Apple Podcasts | Spotify

About our guest

Richard Schneeman (also known as “schneems”) is a Principal Engineer at Heroku (Salesforce). And:

Creator of CodeTriage (helped over 66,000+ developers get started with Open Source)
Maintainer of the Heroku Ruby Buildpack
Co-author of the book “Heroku: Up and Running”
Core team of Puma and Sprockets, one of the top 50 contributors to Rails, and maintains 50+ open source libraries with 1.9+ billion downloads
Won a community award for his involvement in open source back in 2016 called “Ruby Heroes”.

Episode Notes

00:00 Intro
02:28 say hello to our cat, bob!
03:25 what prevents developers from contributing to open source?
04:58 the bystander effect
06:42 not comfortable contributing to new repo
08:30 be a lurker: read a PR and leave a thumbs up
10:12 building tiny habits for Open Source
11:19 do you really want to contribute to open source?
13:53 If you contribute to Open Source, can you skip coding interviews?
14:39 do you need a CS degree to contribute to Open Source?
15:14 use a fake account or nickname on GitHub
16:18 what prevents people from contributing more?
17:52 how do you find time to contribute to open source?
19:00 how to do open source work as part of my job?
21:53 how do you find Open Source projects to contribute to?
24:16 how to build a culture of open source at work?
27:20 what is CodeTriage & how it works?
28:56 writing the book How to Open Source
30:07 tips for getting started with open source
32:23 workarounds vs fixing bugs upstream
34:10 can you get promoted by doing open source work?
37:29 open source work and becoming Principal Engineer
40:26 making mistakes in public
41:57 merging the wrong commit in Ruby on Rails
44:39 what if my Pull Request is rejected?
50:00 how to build a contribution practice
55:14 closing remarks

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