Published June 08, 2025
Before I attended my first PyCon I had a vague idea of what Open Source meant but I had never actually done anything with it. At that first PyCon I had an afternoon flight home so I popped over to the convention center for the morning to check out the sprints. I went over to one of the groups that was sprinting and asked what I could do. I was tossed a "good first issue" ticket and asked to work on it. About a month later, after some back and forth with the maintainers that task was finished and the PR merged. To be honest, the time it took and the lack of real understanding of what I was doing soured me on the idea of contributing to Open Source for a while.
Fast forward a bit and I decided to try looking to see if there was anything I could contribute to but I had no idea where to look or what projects might need help. I had decided that I wanted to give back to the commmunity through contributing to Open Source but I didn't know how or where.
This year at PyCon I intentionally stayed for the sprints. I paid attention when the people who had projects that were participating spoke about what there projects were and picked one I found interesting, render-engine. I worked with the maintainer who was running the sprint, Jay, to pick a couple of tickets that I could help on and got to work. By the end of the day most of the changes I had made were merged in and a PR was open for the final one. After I got home I continued to contribute to the project. Last week I was given merge rights and became one of the maintainers for the project.
One of the things about render-engine is that it is "batteries not included", meaning that it should
contain the minimum necessary to do the job of rendering a static site. For 🔋s we need to have a way to extend the
engine. In come plugins. I had a couple of things that I wanted to do for my own site, but those definitely qualify
as 🔋s. So I wrote the plugins (and found some serious issues with the plugin management that will be fixed in the
next release.) I brought these up in our discord server and it was suggested that if I found these useful so might
others. I can't disagree with that so I decided I would need to publish them to PyPI so that other people that
are interested in using them can take advantage of them.
So now I have these plugins (that I can't publish quite yet because of the aforementioned issues in the plugin management) and I want to make them available. But I've never pushed anything to PyPI. I've never made a package. I don't even have an account on PyPI. So I set one up and, to try it and make sure I understood how to do everything, I pushed up the word search generator that I wrote a few months ago. Turns out it's not as hard as I thouhgt and I was able to get it done in the scope of an evening.
Less than a month ago I had made a single, solitary contribution to an Open Source project, a little over 2 years
ago. Today I am a maintainer on a collaborative open source project; I have pushed a package of my own for people
to use; I have plans to add more of my own things, like a plugin pack for render-engine with all of the
plugins I've written for my own use.
I'm not quite sure what the tl;dr here is. Is it that when you find a project you like, with a good group of people, it's fun to work on and join the people? Is it you just need a little nudge to get going on something you had vaguely been interested in? Is it that Open Source isn't necessarily as hard as it seems? I think it's probably some combination of all of them. For me I know my journey in Open Source is just beginning, both in contributing to collaborative projects and in doing my own things and making them available.
If you're interested in kicking off your own Open Source journey or want to talk more about mine, drop me a line on Mastodon or Bluesky and we'll talk.