Open Source Contributing with Brian Douglas

The open source coding philosophy has enormous appeal to many software engineers, and with good reason. Open source libraries, applications, and operating systems are now essential to the overall technology ecosystem. And the number of open source projects is only increasing. But many developers don’t know how to get involved in open source. Or, they may have even faced resistance when trying to make a pull request to their favorite open source codebase.

Open Sauced is a platform to help developers get involved in open source development. While the number of GitHub stars on a project is often seen as a metric of success for a code base, Open Sauced focuses on the number of new contributors on a project. This number serves as a signal to help drive the platform’s recommendation system, which pairs its users with open source projects in need of developers. Brian Douglas is a former Developer Experience Lead at Netlify and he was the Director of Developer Advocacy at GitHub. He is also the founder and CEO of Open Sauced and he is our guest in this episode.

Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that help developers write better TypeScript more easily, most notably on typescript-eslint: the tooling that enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh regularly contributes to open source projects in the ecosystem such as ESLint and TypeScript. Josh is a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and the author of the acclaimed Learning TypeScript (O’Reilly), a cherished resource for any developer seeking to learn TypeScript without any prior experience outside of JavaScript. Josh regularly presents talks and workshops at bootcamps, conferences, and meetups to share knowledge on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and general frontend and web development.

You can find Josh on: Bluesky, Fosstodon, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, and joshuakgoldberg.com.

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