What comes after Git Push

Justin Dorfman explores ways that people who do not have backgrounds in software engineering can contribute to the open source movement. Code is just one piece of the puzzle. There's much more to making an open source project successful. Community management, documentation, design, fundraising, and marketing are needed to sustain a project beyond "git push origin master."

A few events in a person’s life trigger sparks that won’t die. One of mine was learning about the “view source” option in the Netscape browser. It changed the way I thought about and used computers. Unfortunately, I wasn’t gifted with great software development skills, but I did my best. Still, I was angry and jealous of developers because I didn’t have the skills to commit code to an open source project. Then I learned that open source is way more than code. A successful project requires documentation, translation, sponsorships, design, communication, guidelines, and community management to sustain itself. Join me as I explore the ways ways that people who do not have backgrounds in software engineering can contribute to the open source movement. Open source isn’t just a commit, a patch, or a pull request. It is about bringing humans together of all different skill sets, from different backgrounds, with different life experiences, and solving problems together.