The story so far of my experience joining the rust FOSS community. Starting from learning about the community and its values, through my initial efforts to contribute to various projects, and finishing in my current more refined views towards selecting open source work and how to approach it constructively.
new rustaceans looking to get more involved in the community or looking for opportunities to learn more about rust.
- 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.
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.
no idea what to put for why im qualified
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no idea what to put here.