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Baby's First Open Source Project
- 1. Baby’s First Open SourceProject Liz Baillie @_lbaillie
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- 6. (we have atable in the hall)
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- 14. green up my GitHubprofile
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- 25. my first open sourceproject!! 💖 💖 💖
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- 31. write a bunchof issues
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- 47.
- 48. it’s like I’ma real open source person or something
- 49. CLOSE only counts in horseshoesand hand grenades
- 50. definitely not hereto show you my perfect and totally complete app (because it’s not a thing yet)
- 51. 1. Ember (theframework) is awesome
- 52. 2. Ember (thecommunity) is awesome
- 53. 3. I amhere to recruit you!
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- 55.
Editor's Notes
- #3 Hi! My name is Liz.
- #4 I’m an engineer at Tilde.
- #5 I work on our product, Skylight
- #6 which is a Rails profiler.
- #7 We actually have a table right out there in the hall that you might have seen me standing behind at some point over the last two days.
- #8 Anyway!
- #9 So, in spite of the fact that I never seen to have enough free time
- #10 , or any free time at all really, last year I decided I needed
- #11 A PROJECT.
- #12 something I could work on regularly
- #13 preferably open source
- #14 so I could improve my skills
- #15 and maybe green up my GitHub profile a little bit
- #16 I contributed a few small things here and there
- #17 but still hadn’t found the one project I really felt I could throw myself into
- #18 so I started asking around if anyone needed help with any tech stuff at organizations I thought were cool.
- #19 Enter: the Degenderettes! A self-described “friendly international feminist and genderqueer agitprop club”
- #20 I first heard about them during their All Gender Restroom Sticker Kickstarter campaign
- #21 and they seemed really well aligned with my values and ideals,
- #22 so I reached out to them just to ask if they needed any help with their site
- #23 Well, they didn’t need help with the site
- #24 but they had ideas for a safety app that had been scrapped a while back, so they asked if I’d be interested in picking that up
- #25 My eyes lit up! YES! A thousand times yes! I hadn’t had the chance to build an app from scratch in YEARS, so this was perfect.
- #26 Pretty soon I had… MY FIRST OPEN SOURCE PROJECT!!!
- #27 Let me just quickly show you the very rough mockup of the idea so you know at least kind of what I’m talking about when I talk about this app. Let’s say you’re in an unsafe situation, but it doesn’t really warrant calling police, you just kind of want to gather a bunch of friends quickly to help you hold space.
- #28 So you can select which group to send an alert to
- #29 And then those people will receive an alert. They can see where you are on Google Maps and let you know they’re on their way or they can’t come. Pretty simple.
- #30 I had the perfect plan
- #31 get a really basic MVP up and running
- #32 create a bunch of issues for everything else
- #33 and recruit people to come in and work on it
- #34 I would just have to get it off the ground and then try and build a community to help maintain it. Plus it would be a great reason to try some new libraries and frameworks. Sounds easy enough, right?
- #35 Eh, not so much. It turns out that building an app from scratch almost completely on your own when you’ve never really done so before is extremely hard, and doubly so if you’re trying to learn a bunch of new things on top of that. I decided it made more sense to go with what I knew,
- #36 so I started from scratch using good old Ember and Rails.
- #37 Of course, things were still far from easy. Enter: the gracious kindness and helpfulness of the open source community! I started asking for help, and I got it!
- #38 Locks helped me a bunch all the way from Portugal! The internet is amazing!
- #39 Sometimes I still can’t believe it’s a thing that I can pair remotely with someone in freaking Portugal. It’s so cool.
- #40 I also got some help from other people I met randomly on Twitter. I’d be like “Hey Twitter can you help me figure out what’s going on with my authentication flow?” and BOOM someone was helping me figure it out later that day.
- #41 Pretty soon I was getting overwhelmed by life stuff and there was no way I was going to get this thing in a workable state anytime soon
- #42 so I asked for help again, and I got it!
- #43 Tim here, aka im-tay ade-way on GitHub, actually put in a few pull requests pretty quickly so I was like
- #44 hey friend
- #45 do you wanna
- #46 maybe be a regular contributor to the project? and work with me on a bunch of stuff I’m trying to get done?
- #47 luckily he was pretty receptive to that, and I had my first regular contributor!
- #48 We are definitely learning some things together while we work on it,
- #49 but it feels pretty cool to actually have someone submitting PRs and looking to me for guidance and stuff. Even though sometimes it takes me a week to look at a pull request. I’m doing my best!
- #50 So, we still have not finished the MVP, but we’re pretty close!
- #51 I’m definitely not here to be like “look at my cool app that I built with Ember!” because it’s totally not done yet. BUT! I would like you to walk away from this talk knowing THREE things:
- #52 ONE: Ember is a fantastic framework to use when you’re trying to get something up and running quickly, and you’re not in a position to really teach a bunch of people something from scratch. Tim, who’s been helping a bunch, didn’t really know Ember when he started helping me out, but he was able to pick it up really easily and be productive quickly.
- #53 TWO: The Ember community is fantastic! People are generally super nice and really helpful. Every time I needed help, someone was there. I mean, locks was helping me out all the way from Portugal! That’s wild. One of the biggest reasons I wanted to get involved in open source to begin with was that I love the idea of a community of likeminded people coming together to get things done and help each other out, just because they want to, and so far that’s been the experience I’ve had with the various communities I’ve gotten involved with, Ember in particular.
- #54 And finally, THREE: I am in fact here to recruit you. if you’re interested in helping out with Assemble, which is the mobile app I’ve working on for the Degenderettes
- #55 take a look at the repos, feel free to pick up an issue, or just DM me on Twitter and ask how you can help. Beginners welcome! There’s plenty to do for people at every level. I may not have gotten a chance to add all the issues yet but definitely DM me if you’re interested in helping.
- #56 Thank you so much!