Contributing to the Erlang Ecosystem. My Journey from Individual Contributor to Maintainer

Speaker:
Benjamin Philip


Abstract:

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

Audience:
Introductory and overview

Tags:
Growth-of-the-Ecosystem