gistfile1.txt

# Rustaceans! We Can Help!

## Abstract

Are you a new rustacean trying to take your first steps into rust's open source
community? Are you trying to meet people in the rust community but don't know
where to start? Are you a maintainer interested in attracting new contributors?
Then have I got the talk for you! Together we will explore some approaches to
finding issues to work on, finding new projects, structuring your projects to
help new contributors, and meeting other rust developers to become a happy and
successful contributor in the rust open source community.

## Details

### intended audience

new rustaceans and maintainers of open source rust projects looking for more
contributors

### outline

- A quick summary of my initial experience learning about rust and its
  community
    - CoC, how awesome and encouraging it was
    - TWIR, how it lead me to try to find issues on github to do
- Start wanting to contribute to help me learn more about rust (#1 priority)
  and to give back to the community (#2 priority).
- Completing various random issues on rust tools projects
    - Mix of positive and negative interactions with maintainers, mainly
      concerns with responsiveness of maintainers.
    - Fun but hard to modivate on and pick new issues, the work I was doing was
      mostly simple and unexciting, main effort went into exploring and
      understanding the various new codebases.
- Going to meetups, getting mentorship and more encouragement from the meetup
  organizer, finding a project that was in active development to work on from
  one of the presenters
    - Mentor helped me motivate and find more interesting tasks to work on,
      better than working with github issue tracker directly.
    - Active project had more opportunities for writing complex rust code and
      was far more informative. Leaned on mentor to help figure out complex
      higher order lifetime compiler errors. Learned far more about rust from
      this project than from random good-first-issues on github.
- Have epiphany to fix bugs that I personally run into or implement features I
  personally want.
    - Easier to motivate, much more exciting to fix things that I have a
      personal stake in.
    - Some tasks ended up being much more involved than initially expected,
      back to hard to motivate, but now its because theres an intimidating
      amount of work to be done rather than boring work to be done.
- Present day, happy with my approach to picking OSS work and excited to
  continue to contribute to all the projects I've become involved in.

## Pitch

This talk could serve as good encouragement for new-comers to the rust FOSS
community and help them find paths to becoming regular contributors that they
might otherwise not consider before becoming discouraged and pulling away.

My qualifications are based on various contributions I've made to cargo, rustc,
clippy, rustfix, and tokio-rs/tracing.

## Bio

going to fill this in later