Sharing is Caring: How To Be A Good Open Source Citizen
I love writing blog posts about problems that I’ve encountered in various tech realms. To me, it serves two purposes:
- It’s self-serving! I have a written record of my learnings and troubleshooting steps so that I can go back to them if I get stuck again.
- It helps folks in the community! Let’s face it…if I encountered these problems, then chances are that others will encounter them too.
It’s great to give back to the community by having content help others. I do it, and many others do it as well. Plus, I’m not gonna lie: it helps build my personal brand. Win-win!
Most of my content over the last 2–3 years has been heavily focused on OpenTelemetry (OTel), and it warms my heart when I hear from folks who have found my content useful. That said, it can’t just stop with personal blog posts. The only way to help strengthen the OpenTelemetry community is by also contributing those learnings back to the OTel docs. Why?
- The OTel docs should be the source of truth for all things OTel
- You have a one-stop shop for finding information about OTel
Does that mean that you should stop posting to your blog as well? Not at all. Just do the community an additional favour and share your learnings back to the official docs.
Remember: This doesn’t apply only to OpenTelemetry. This goes for any open source project out there that you know and love. Unfortunately, it took me a few years to realize this myself, but now I try to make sure that when I blog about something OTel, I find a way to include those same learnings back in the docs. Pay it forward, y’all, so that we can have a stronger open source community!!
PS: If you’re interested in learning how to contribute to OpenTelemetry, check out this post.
Peace, love, and code! ✌️💜👩💻
