My unexpected contribution experience at Capital One

When Capital One was looking for a tool to help manage its software development pipeline, Jonathan Bodner suggested LGTM, an open source pull request approval system, as a starting point. After fixing bugs and adding new features to LGTM, Jonathan contacted Capital One's open source office so he could return his changes to the community. And that's where things got interesting.

When Capital One was looking for a tool to help manage its software development pipeline, I suggested LGTM, an open source pull request approval system, as a starting point. After fixing bugs and adding new features to LGTM, I contacted Capital One’s open source office so I could return my changes to the community. And that’s where things got interesting. I’ll talk about the process of forking an open source project for internal corporate use and what happens when you try to contribute it back. I expected it to be a straightforward process, but it was a story of heroes with interlocking concerns (and no villains). Along the way, I found a team of people to continue to develop the project internally, a community of users who provided feature requests and encouragement, corporate rules that vacillated between supportive and stifling, and an open source project with an uncertain future. This session is sponsored by CapitalOne.