I’m Sarah Abderemane, a software engineer at Kraken based in France.
I’ve been a contributor to some projects related to the Python language and Django framework and I’m a maintainer of the Django website for a few years.
You can find out more about me on my website and follow me on social media.
How I started to contribute
My journey began a few years ago with Hacktoberfest, the most popular project to start contributing to open source.
I contributed to a small project to explain part of a language like you’re 5, for python language. After some time, I ended up reviewing others’ issues. There was some issue in my submission for Hacktoberfest so I chatted with the maintainer to figure out the issue. At the end, I was offered to become a maintainer for the next year to help review the submissions and create new issues.
Then, I contributed to bigger issues and bigger projects with the creation of the read the docs of Jupyter accessibility repository and I finally contributed to Django website to implement dark mode on the website and I became a maintainer after this.
Vision and challenges
Open source to me is a good way to share what we could have in common, improve something and give back to the community. It also means facing interesting questions and thinking about how to solve issues at our level.
As a maintainer we faced many challenges depending on the project: need of money to make some improvements, make sure to keep our existing users and attract new users. Also, keep in mind the diversity, to me it’s important to have that to make people feel comfortable contributing because this is meant to be usable for everyone without exception.
All of that means that you have to keep a good balance with your personal life, which is not always simple. Find time for yourself, do sports, see friends, do extra activities… and have enough time to review issues and PRs when you don’t have time during the day. One thing you have to know is what your capacity is and set clear boundaries to avoid doing more than you can handle.
Maintaining a project can be challenging but it is a rewarding experience. You learn a lot. How to interact with people from other countries, how to structure the project so that it is understandable to everyone, etc. It’s great to see so many people using what you have done or view folks having some interest in your project.
Community from the maintainer perspective
Building a community when you are a maintainer is not simple on a project which is big like Django. You have to follow the predefined rules and conform to the standards.
It’s not easy to attract contributors and maintainers on a big project that have specific rules to follow, in order to keep all Django projects healthy and sustainable, but having a welcoming community is important.
One way we grow the community is via a mentorship program, Djangonaut Space, that helps folks to contribute to Django core and its ecosystem with a mentor and a supporter to help through the open source journey with things like impostor syndrome.
I hope that we have more people who contribute to open source and Django projects, and they will be the next generation to contribute and maintain those projects.