Lately the Erlang Ecosystem has grown to address many new domains. But is its community growing enough to support it? My experience as a new contributor may shed light on this.
I’m a 16 year old student who started contributing to the Livebook, Hexpm and Nx projects at 14. Since then I’ve grown from being a raw newbie to receiving funding from The EEF to work on packages that will support Erlang’s telemetry implementation.
Join me as I talk about my challenging transition and see how I:
- overcame my fear of the opensource community
- learned to work with other members
- found more meaningful ways to contribute
- learned to balance my contributions with my other priorities
If you’re new to the community, you’ll learn how to get started and grow in the community - even if you have as little experience as i did.
Maintainers will see how the community helped me to make valuable contributions, how it got in my way, and how my experiences can help their projects.
OBJECTIVES: This talk has 2 major objectives:
- Convince more people to get involved in the Erlang Community by illustrating how easy and effortless it is to make valuable contributions - no matter your background
- Show maintainers and community leaders what elements of the community ethos enabled even a teenager to contribute, and what elements were a stumbling block
If you are interested in growing in the community, expect to also learn:
- How to find projects to help out with and contributions to make
- How to build relationships with other members of the community
- How to balance your opensource work with other aspects of your life
AUDIENCE: This talk is targeted at people:
- who would like to get started with contributing to the Erlang Ecosystem
- looking to grow in the community while maintaining a work-life balance
- maintainers who would like to grow their projects
- leaders of the community interested in a unique perspective