Breaking Barriers: Unlocking Opportunities Through Open Source
Have you ever found yourself stuck in the endless loop of needing experience to get a job, but struggling to get experience because no one will hire you without it? It’s a typical case of a Catch-22 — a paradox where you need something you can’t get without already having it. It’s a frustrating cycle that many people in tech — especially those from underrepresented groups—face. You may feel like you’ve hit a wall, unable to break through. But what if the very thing you’re missing—experience—is something you can create on your own?
I’m Camila Maia, a backend developer who’s been in tech since 2010. For the past few years, I’ve been diving deep into Developer Experience and dedicating a good part of my time to contributing to and advocating for Open Source. I’m also Brazilian, a woman, a lesbian, and a person with a disability (low vision) — sharing this feels important, especially for those who might be looking for someone they can relate to.
In this article, I’ll take you through my journey in the Open Source world — how it’s shaped my path, continues to guide my professional choices, and keeps influencing what’s ahead. I’ll also share how it helped me find purpose in my career, something I couldn’t achieve while working exclusively with private code in companies.
On top of that, I’ll explore how Open Source is not just a tool for development, but a powerful vehicle for creating opportunities and empowering others — whether through teaching, mentoring, or opening doors that weren’t available in more closed environments.
Open Source, Camila. Camila, Open Source
It all started during my time at Loadsmart, a logistics company where I spent nearly four years. It was there that I met Gustavo Barbosa — and everything started to shift. He introduced me to Danger, an open-source tool that automates tasks and highlights issues during code reviews, and a plugin he had created, danger-android_lint, which integrates Android Lint checks directly into pull requests. From the moment I saw it, I was hooked.
At the time, around 2018, GitHub Actions wasn’t around yet. The idea of automating Pull Request reviews in such a simple, flexible way felt like magic. But what truly fascinated me was the global collaboration I saw happening. People from different corners of the world working together on the same codebase, even though they had never met — that blew my mind. It was this sense of community that drew me in and made me realize the power of Open Source.
One day, we spent hours trying to fix a bug in Danger and just couldn’t crack it. While I was visiting Loadsmart’s New York office, we decided to check out a CocoaPods Peer Lab Meetup at Artsy — hoping we could get help. There, we paired with Orta Therox, the creator of Danger, and together we finally solved it. Sitting with him, learning, chatting, eating pizza — it was surreal. That experience showed me firsthand how Open Source can lead to genuine connection, shared knowledge, and opportunities that might never happen in more traditional tech spaces.
As I immersed myself more and more in the Open Source world, I started hearing stories that inspired me deeply. I learned about Felix Krause and his tool Fastlane, Max Stoiber and his project react-boilerplate, and many others who had built incredible things. Each story added fuel to the fire — I knew I wanted to be part of this movement.
Born from the Fire: My Own Open Source Spark
It was mid-2019, and I was playing the “firefighter” role on my team — the person responsible for fixing bugs and keeping things from catching fire while everyone else focused on building new features. That sprint, though, the number of bugs skyrocketed. As I dove into the chaos, a pattern started to emerge: most of the issues stemmed from broken communication between services — mismatched data, outdated documentation, and APIs that just didn’t behave as expected.
Debugging was painful. To test a single endpoint, I often had to recreate an entire chain of previous requests, sometimes across services we didn’t even control. That’s when I started thinking: there has to be a better way. I sketched out what this “better way” could look like — something to test both owned and third-party APIs, generate up-to-date documentation automatically, and even chain requests together. I spent a weekend building a proof of concept and shared it with my team on Monday.
That project became ScanAPI. I built it from the beginning with Open Source in mind, designing it to be language-agnostic and easy to extend. It started as a tool to solve our pain, but quickly grew into something bigger — a way to help anyone, anywhere, ensure their APIs actually work the way they’re supposed to.
A Door Opens
By 2021, things were starting to shift. I had spoken about ScanAPI at several national and international conferences, and the response was overwhelming. People weren’t just interested — they were captivated. I started joining live streams to showcase the tool in action, and every time I hit “run,” I could see the excitement in the chat. The GitHub stars kept climbing. My little firefighter side project had turned into something that genuinely helped people — and they were telling me so.
In March of that year, I left my job. With more free time on my hands, I decided to fully dedicate myself to ScanAPI. I didn’t know exactly what I was aiming for, but I knew I wanted to see how far I could go if I gave it my full attention.
Then, in May, something unexpected happened.
I received an email from someone named Daniel Compton at GitHub. It wasn’t spam — it was real. New Relic, a major tech company, wanted to sponsor my GitHub profile. I was stunned. It was the first time someone wanted to financially support what I was building. It felt surreal.
There was just one problem: GitHub Sponsors wasn’t available in Brazil yet. After a few back-and-forth emails, Daniel told me:
“We’re working to enable Brazil as an option for Sponsors so you can sign up. You’ll be the first person in Brazil to join!”
That sentence stuck with me. The first person in Brazil. I couldn’t believe it. Not only was I getting sponsored — I was also paving the way for other Brazilian developers to follow. It felt bigger than me.
And still in May 2021, it happened. I officially became the first Brazilian to join GitHub Sponsors. It was a spark. A glimmer of something I had never thought could be real: what if I could live from Open Source? What if the work I loved, the work that felt most meaningful to me, could also sustain me?
Later that year, in December, ScanAPI received a one-time donation of $1,000 USD through GitHub Sponsors. It came from Red Hat. No email. No announcement. Just support. Back in October 2020, I had given a talk about ScanAPI to their internal engineering team, invited by Og Maciel. I had no idea it had made that kind of impact. But apparently, it had.
That was the beginning of a dream. A dream to live off Open Source. Not just for me — but so that others, especially those who come from places and backgrounds like mine, could see that it’s possible too.
The Cost of a Dream
Dreams can be powerful — but they also come with a price.
After the initial excitement — the talks, the stars, the sponsorships — reality started to knock. And this time, it didn’t ask for permission.
The financial support I was receiving from GitHub Sponsors was meaningful, but it wasn’t enough to cover my basic living expenses. I had poured everything into a project I truly believed in, but I couldn’t make it sustainable — at least, not alone.
At the same time, I found myself in a strange paradox: collaborating with developers from all over the world, yet feeling deeply alone when it came to key decisions about the project. As the project grew, I became increasingly aware that I didn’t want to be the only person driving it forward. I didn’t want to be the bottleneck. I actively tried to create some kind of shared governance — spaces for discussion, roadmapping sessions, open invitations to co-lead — but none of it really stuck. Despite my efforts, I often found myself making big architectural decisions alone, shaping the roadmap in isolation, unsure if I was heading in the right direction.
People were contributing, and I’m incredibly grateful for that. But the help mostly came through peripheral issues — bug fixes, improvements to documentation, isolated features, CI updates. Those contributions mattered. They kept the project alive. But when it came to the core of ScanAPI — the deep, structural parts of the code, the long-term vision — it was still just me.
There was a gap I couldn’t bridge. Developers with the experience to dive into those complex questions were often fully employed and had little spare time. Meanwhile, those who did have time to engage more deeply were usually still building up the experience needed to navigate such decisions.
And then, beyond code, there was life.
The situation in Brazil was tough. My family and I were feeling unsafe, and the political climate only added to our anxiety. We started considering a move — somewhere we could breathe easier, walk down the street without fear. But making that kind of life change takes money, planning, and stability — three things I didn’t have while trying to live from Open Source.
A New Old Path
The hunt for a new job had begun. I was specifically targeting companies based in Berlin — or at least ones that would allow me to live there. I was looking for a place where I could feel safe, where inclusion and diversity weren’t just buzzwords, and where Open Source wasn’t an afterthought, but something genuinely valued and encouraged.
Throughout this search, I kept coming back to the impact Open Source had already had on my career. I realized early on that my contributions were immensely valuable in hiring processes. These weren’t just code commits — they gave me access to real, meaningful experiences. Through Open Source, I had found myself managing people, projects, and even events. I built leadership skills, collaborated with diverse teams, and took on responsibilities that extended far beyond the technical. All of that gave me concrete, lived examples to draw on when facing tough interview questions — not hypotheticals, but stories rooted in actual work.
I came across some open roles at SoundCloud, and it immediately stood out. I already knew about their legacy — they were the birthplace of Prometheus, one of the most widely used monitoring systems in the world. That alone said a lot. But what really caught my attention was their approach to time: they had a practice called Self-Allocated Time (SAT), previously known as Hacker Time. SAT is a structured policy that gives engineers dedicated time — every week — to explore, create, learn, and contribute beyond the daily backlog. It’s not just tolerated; it’s part of how they work. And that includes contributing to Open Source.
I also had personal connections at SoundCloud, and through them, I knew their commitment to diversity and inclusion was genuine. It wasn’t just a marketing ploy.
I applied. I got the offer. I relocated. In January 2022, I joined SoundCloud — finally in a place where Open Source wasn’t just allowed, it was celebrated.
A Wild Side Quest Appears
Before we continue, let’s take a quick break from the main timeline and rewind a bit — back to July 2021. My cousin — Maria — asked if we could schedule a one-on-one — she had a bunch of questions about tech. After trying many different paths in life, she was now considering a career change to something more stable, and I.T. was on her radar.
That conversation turned into a series. We started meeting regularly with a clear goal: figure out if she would actually enjoy working in tech.
Making a career shift is never easy — especially in places like Brazil, where you often can’t afford to stop working to study full-time. The economy doesn’t leave much room for risk. So before she flipped the table and changed her life completely, we needed to be sure this was the right path for her.
We began with the basics. I explained the different areas within tech, what day-to-day work looks like in each one. It was mostly theory, and we took a few months there. But eventually, theory wasn’t enough. We needed to test it in practice.
She applied to several bootcamps and actually got accepted into a few. But most of them required a heavy time commitment, and she couldn’t afford to leave her job. She eventually found one that fit her schedule and completed it — but even then, everything still felt too abstract. She couldn’t picture what working in tech actually looked like: being part of a team, collaborating on a codebase, navigating real-world tasks and communication.
That’s when it clicked: Open Source.
Open Source could give her a hands-on experience — a real glimpse into the day-to-day life of a developer — before having to go all in. It would let her see the workflows, the tools, the communication style, the problem-solving… all of it.
From there, I started building a whole methodology to teach her how to code — and Open Source became the foundation of the practical phase.
Open Source: A Powerful Educational Tool
For Maria’s hands-on learning journey, we chose to work on brutils-python — a utilities library focused on Brazil-specific data formats. With it, you can validate, format, and generate common national identifiers like personal tax IDs (similar to a Social Security Number), business registration numbers, vehicle license plates, voter IDs, and more.
It was the perfect project: no complex frameworks, no web development, and highly modular features. Ideal for practicing core software development skills in a real-world environment.
In February 2023, Maria made her very first contribution.
Step by step, she learned how the library worked — how to contribute to it, how to maintain it, how to think collaboratively and build for the long term. By October of that same year, during Hacktoberfest, she was already coordinating a group of over ten people contributing simultaneously.
We started sharing the project and this journey in conferences and tech communities. Over time, the impact grew: the library reached over 4,000 downloads per month.
Maria’s confidence as a developer soared. She fell in love with Open Source — and was honestly amazed that people would just show up and contribute to a project they found on GitHub. It gave her a real sense of working in a team, building something that mattered.
Then came something unexpected: she began receiving messages from recruiters, referencing her GitHub profile and her work on brutils. For someone who had never worked in tech before, it was incredible.
With all of this unfolding, we couldn’t help but ask: what if this same approach could work for more people?
Cumbuca Dev
In August 2023, after everything we had learned from Maria’s journey, we decided to take things a step further — and that’s when Cumbuca Dev was born.
Cumbuca Dev is a community-driven educational initiative focused on helping people from underrepresented groups gain real experience in tech, especially through Open Source. We believe learning doesn’t have to happen in isolation, and that meaningful experience doesn’t have to wait until after you land your first job.
One of our core goals is to break a cycle that keeps so many people out of the industry: you need experience to get a job, but you need a job to get experience.
With Cumbuca Dev, we flip that script. Through guided contributions to real projects, mentorship, and collaboration, we help people build skills, confidence, and visibility — even before they write their first résumé.
It started with one person. Now, it’s growing into something bigger.
Old Dream, New Strategy
I spent almost two years working at SoundCloud. It was a time of deep learning and meaningful connections — I met incredible people and, for the first time, got to work in a truly diverse team. But even with all the positives, I couldn’t contribute to Open Source as much as I wanted to through the company.
In December 2023, I joined Trade Republic. But it didn’t take long for me to realize: my path was no longer about working for a company. Cumbuca was taking shape. New projects were blooming. And my time simply wasn’t enough anymore.
So, I made a decision: In May 2024, I left Trade Republic to fully dedicate myself to Cumbuca — and I didn’t stop there. I also moved back to Brazil. Cumbuca was born with Brazil in mind — to help break cycles of exclusion in a country full of potential but short on opportunity. Being closer to the people we aim to support, especially during these crucial first years, was vital. Building real connections, understanding the local context, and being physically present in these spaces matters, especially when your goal is to create something truly grounded in the local reality.
The dream remained the same: to live from Open Source. But now, it had expanded, and so had its purpose. It wasn’t just about me anymore; it was about teaching, supporting, and opening doors for others.
We don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past — creating Open Source projects that depend on a single person to sustain them. That model is unsustainable, burns people out, and limits the collective impact we can have. This time, we’re focused on building a community — one that supports itself and grows from within. We want to foster Open Source in Brazil — and, naturally, extend that impact globally. We believe that if someone’s first experience in tech is through Open Source, they’ll feel its impact from day one. And when that happens, they’re far more likely to keep contributing — becoming part of the cycle and helping grow the community from the inside out.
At the same time, we understand that tech isn’t for everyone — and that’s okay. One of our goals is to help people realize this as early as possible. If we can save someone time, energy, and self-doubt by helping them discover that early on, then that’s a success too.
We’re not doing this alone or in silence. We offer mentorships to support people on their learning journey, and we seize every opportunity to spread the word about Open Source — in conferences, local events, meetups, and communities. And we’re beginning to explore the value of Open Source inside companies — showing its potential and broad impact across teams and the tech ecosystem.
Building from the Basics
Now, we’re building the kind of ecosystem we wish we had when we started.
We’re creating free, accessible content in Portuguese to teach people not only how to code, but also how to be part of the Open Source community — from the very beginning. From the basics. No assumptions, no prior knowledge required. Just clear, welcoming, beginner-friendly guidance for folks who are just taking their first steps in tech.
And we’re not stopping at content.
We’re also building and maintaining repositories with real-world scale and complexity — offering practical, hands-on opportunities to learn by contributing to something that matters.
While we’re starting in Portuguese, we plan to gradually translate everything into English too. It takes time, but we believe it will pay off — and that by building strong foundations in our own language, we’ll create more powerful contributions to the global community.
One of the first steps in this journey is Git e GitHub para Humanos — our first public book, written entirely in Portuguese.
The name roughly translates to “Git and GitHub for Humans”, and that’s exactly the point: making these tools feel approachable to people who are just getting started — especially those who are still learning to program and might feel overwhelmed by all the jargon out there.
The book is fully focused on helping people contribute to Open Source. It brings practical guidance on how to use Git and GitHub in real Open Source workflows — including tips on good practices, how to structure contributions, understanding how repositories work, and how to communicate effectively when opening issues or pull requests.
What makes this guide different is the tone: human, welcoming, and clear. No gatekeeping, no overly complex explanations — just practical knowledge, simple language, and examples that actually make sense in real life.
The guide is still in development, but it already marks the beginning of something much bigger. We know that, for now, this means taking one step back — spending less time maintaining the code itself, and more time building the foundations around it. But we believe this is the only way forward: to grow a community that doesn’t just use Open Source, but understands it, contributes to it, and helps it scale — together. It’s the first building block of a broader ecosystem we’re creating — one that lowers barriers, invites more people in, and helps foster a stronger, more inclusive Open Source culture in Brazil and beyond.
The Ongoing Journey
As I reflect on this journey, I see how Open Source has transformed not just my career, but my personal life as well. It’s been a vehicle for growth, connection, and empowerment, not just for me, but for those I’ve had the privilege to mentor and collaborate with. My journey continues, and I’m excited about where it will take me — and where it can take others. I’ve seen firsthand how Open Source can break barriers, provide opportunities, and allow people from all walks of life to shine. My cousin Maria’s transformation from a beginner to a leader in the Open Source community is just one example of the profound impact it can have.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned through all of this, it’s that Open Source is more than just code. It’s about people. It’s about building a community where everyone, regardless of background or experience, has a chance to contribute, grow, and make a difference. And that’s why I’ll continue to invest in it — not just for my own growth, but to ensure that the doors Open Source has opened for me remain wide open for others too.
I want to take a moment to thank everyone who has contributed to this journey — whether by sharing knowledge, offering guidance, sharing your story, or simply being part of the community. Your support has been invaluable, and I’m incredibly grateful for each and every person who has helped shape this experience. It’s through collaboration, mutual support, and the inspiring stories we share that we motivate others and continue to move forward together.
If you’re curious to learn more about the projects we’re building, feel free to explore cumbuca.dev, our GitHub organization at github.com/cumbucadev, and some of the initiatives close to our hearts like ScanAPI, brutils-python, and Git e GitHub para Humanos. We’d love for you to join us on this journey — whether by contributing, learning, or simply sharing the passion for making Open Source more inclusive for everyone.
Open Source is a powerful way to break the First Job Catch-22. If you feel stuck, know that you’re not alone — the community is here to help you create your own opportunities. Just start contributing, and you’ll be amazed at how doors begin to open.
Camila Maia
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