For the past decade, I've been making non-code contributions to projects such as Bootstrap, Font Awesome, jQuery, Nginx, GNU Bash, and many more. I would be lying if I told you that there wasn't some stigma attached to it. A lot of developers think open source contributions only count if they come from a text editor.

Hate to break them, but open source needs non-code contributors to work. In fact, my most impactful contributions didn't require a line of code.

That is why I'm starting this newsletter. To encourage those non-code/technical contributors to make their mark in one of the greatest communities ever created.

Tweets

The first tweet I ever had to mute. 🔕

“I believe this @xkcd comic is the greatest non-code contribution to #opensource in the past decade.” went viral 🔥

Geoffrey Huntley and Sustaining OSS with Gitpod

Geoffrey Huntley is a developer who also makes non-code contributions. Listen to him talk about sustaining open source coders using Gitpod, and how maintainers should ask for and use the money to fund open source!

Podcasts

KEDA (Kubernetes Event-driven Autoscaling) Maintainers on Non-Code Contributions

“I would like to say that this is super important, like not just doing the code as mentioned, but all the stuff around, it is very important to have like active project and the health, because if you don’t have the healthy environment around, the project was stale basically.”

Jono Bacon on Building Sustainable Communities

Jono Bacon, author of People Powered and long-time open source community builder, joins us to talk about how unique OSS communities are, and how to engineer them for impact