Editor's Note: We're celebrating February 3rd, the day the term "Open Source" was first coined, as World Open Source Day here at Sonatype by recognizing our incredible maintainers and contributors, and the open source projects they support. Read all about Paul Horton's journey below.
My first (real) open source contribution was some typo fixes in a readme file.
As per most, I'm a self-taught techie. I've done development throughout my career amongst many other things, but as I joined Sonatype there was a "hey we need help" for CycloneDX Python tooling - and I enjoy writing in Python. Make no mistake - I'm no Python guru (far from it!), but the projects needed some help, it was interesting and I felt able to help - so I did.
Never looked back. I've learnt so much, and also met a bunch of great people (virtually) on the journey.
Consistency - and being present. One-off contributions of course are helpful, but consistency within a project or area really does help. You bring more than just your coding skills - you become an expert in the project and related material, which only leads to a better project.
Loads. Documentation is an easy one, but what I love to see as a maintainer is real users of the projects raising ideas and requests for new features or fixes and then engaging with us to work out the right way forward.
More Python?
Absolutely. If this was a commercial venture, you'd think about your customer's needs. In Open Source, your customer is potentially everyone. To me this means we have to:
Key people who've helped me: