Quotes wanted

[denise]

For the presentation mark and I are giving at LinuxConf AU, I'd like to be able to intersperse some good quotes from various Dreamwidth developers in our slides. To that end, if you've got a few minutes, I'd love to hear from some of you, especially people who started programming with us (or are using us to dust off rusty skills).

The topic of the talk is "Building your own contributors", and it's going to be concentrating on the steps we take to a) attract and retain qualified contributors who have a whole host of projects clamoring for their attention, and b) train people who have interest in contributing, but don't necessarily feel like they have the skills out of the box and need some coaching.

I'm looking mostly for soundbite-type comments, but if you tl;dr on the questions I'm sure I'll be able to use what you say somehow. *g*

If you'd like to help out, leave a comment with a quick introduction outlining your background (both your experience with programming in general, and any experience you've had contributing to other open source projects), and then answers to any/some/all of the following:

What first attracted you to contributing to Dreamwidth?

What are some of the things that we (the DW project maintainers) did to make you feel welcome?

What's the best thing we did to help you get up to speed and contribute effectively?

Was there anything in particular, big or small, that made you decide that DW was the kind of project you wanted to contribute to?

If you've had experience on other OSS projects, what makes DW different? Better? (Worse?)

What's your favorite part about the DW project culture?

Do you have any good stories to share about awesome moments?

What are some of the things you've learned, both technical and otherwise, while working on DW that you don't think you would have learned otherwise?

(If there's anything else you want to discuss that isn't mentioned specifically in the questions, but that you think someone who's trying to do a DW-style OSS project should know, add that as well!)

Comments

[kareila]

I came to Dreamwidth because I already knew Mark and Janine and wanted their new site to succeed. I was NOT specifically invited to help with coding, but it was obvious that the need was there, and I felt I understood the Perl language well enough to be useful, in spite of a lack of previous experience with this sort of project. I started out fixing a few tiny things, all the while asking Mark how to find things in the code, until I developed enough familiarity to do things on my own. That one-on-one mentoring was invaluable.

I think my favorite aspect of the DW project culture is that every contribution is welcomed, even if it's incomplete or flawed. There is a sense that we want to help developers improve instead of rejecting them for not meeting some sort of standard of quality. I suspect this is an attitude that is, if not unique among OSS projects, certainly unusual.