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**Mikeal Rogers:** And I'm Mikeal Rogers. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** On today's show, Mikeal and I talk with Charlotte Spencer, a software developer who's done a lot of notable work around making open source more approachable, and is a core member of the Hoodie project. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Charlotte is the creator of Your First PR, an organization that helps people make their first open source contribution, and helps projects attract new contributors. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** In our time with Charlotte we got inside the head of first-time contributors and talked about what projects can do to attract, retain and communicate with contributors. |
Charlotte, let's kick things off. What was your very first PR? |
**Charlotte Spencer:** I had to check before we had this conversation. If you're using firstpr.me, by the lovely Andrew, who I believe that you had on your podcast a couple of weeks ago... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Oh, Andrew Nesbitt. |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah. Apparently my first pull request was spelling changes. I found some spelling mistakes in some kind of Node.js Express tutorial and fixed those, about three years ago. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Was this part of the 24 Pull Requests? |
**Charlotte Spencer:** No, I've just grown up; I had the nickname spell checker, because I'm physically unable to do anything until I've corrected a spelling mistake... So I just saw it, and then discovered that I could press "Edit" on the page, and then did the thing. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Was it scary to make your first PR, or was it just sort of like "Oh, easy edit." |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Oh no, it was kind of scary because I wasn't even a programmer at this point. I just knew what GitHub was. This was done three years ago, and I've actually been a programmer for two years. So it was kind of a "I hope no one is mean to me and this is the right thing to do." But it went really well... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Given that you've also recently learned how to program, and at the same time were getting into open source - I'm curious how those experiences were similar or different. |
**Charlotte Spencer:** I'd say learning to do open source is obviously aided by being a developer, but I felt like the skill sets are very different. You can learn how to code, but you can do that in isolation, you can do that on your own. You can work on your own, you can be a contractor on your own in your little bed... |
You're a developer, and then you have to go, "Oh wow, there are all these people who have opinions and need my help." So there's a lot more social aspect that has to be learned with open source, which is quite difficult. People call them soft skills, but I think they're hard skills. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It seems scarier somehow. |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah, well there are people - particularly when you become a project maintainer... There are lots of people who expect something of you. Like, you need to always be on and you need to always be ready to answer a question, but like "I'm in bed. Leave me alone." \[laughs\] Which I haven't said to a... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Are there any projects that do a better job of onboarding into that social atmosphere? |
**Charlotte Spencer:** \[03:49\] Well, I guess a shameless plug for the open source project that I'm a member of - Hoodie. I know that you had Jan Lehnhardt on - who was the co-creator of that - a few weeks ago. I think that there's always things that we can improve on, but we do a pretty good job of onboarding people.... |
We mentor the pull request and invite you to Slack channels etc. As soon as you've made your first pull request, we invite you to be a contributor of the team. It can be quite fast and overwhelming - it was overwhelming when I came into Hoodie for the first time, but I think we do a very good job, at least from the beg... |
As Jan mentioned a few weeks ago, we're not very good yet at the "What next?" kind of things. We have a lot of people who contribute for the first time and then may not be able to do something after that. That's something that we need to talk about and work out how to keep people interested and keep people solving thin... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It's a good problem to have, though. I mean, you've done such a good job at getting people over the first step into the pipeline... |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah, it's also the scariest part. At that point people don't seem to be as fearful of contributing to open source, but we kind of don't yet have enough to give them to keep them doing the thing. They overcome their first barrier, and then we're like, "Oh yeah, we should probably think about how ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** And you're in that position yourself with Hoodie, right? Can you tell us and our listeners a little bit about how you went from your first contribution to Hoodie to becoming a member of the core team? |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Oh, that's not a particularly interesting story, because it happened by accident. As I already mentioned, I don't enjoy spelling mistakes. There's nothing wrong with doing them, but I like to correct them if people are willing for me to do that. I think I followed Jan for some time on Twitter, an... |
Then I think it was Ola Gasidlo - who is awesome - who messaged me saying, "Hey, do you wanna be part of the GitHub group?" and I was like, "Yeah, cool." I started to focus a lot on accessibility and stuff... So, PR, PR, PR, but mainly focusing on the community and accessibility parts, and then I guess almost a year la... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It's kind of interesting, because it seems like there are skills that you also had to learn outside of the project itself. That project might not always have the resources to teach a new contributor before you're able to do other things. |
**Charlotte Spencer:** \[07:59\] Yeah. I think the best thing about the experience is that Hoodie were always around to answer questions. I'd sit in the Slack and I'd be like, "Oh, how do I do this? What's the best way to do this?" I wasn't ever doing it alone, and I think when you get large open source projects you're... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It sounds also like you're bringing a skillset that they were lacking a little bit, as well. The contribution is also really valued because it's not like they're just teaching how to do things that they were doing. You're actually bringing a lot of great skills to the table, as well. |
**Charlotte Spencer:** I like to think so. \[laughter\] I mentioned Hacktoberfest, and we've got a lot of really good issues out there. That issue template kind of was kickstarted by me, because Hoodie allowed me to create my own open source project, which is Your First PR. I couldn't proclaim that we should be writing... |
The good thing about open source is that you can really get a lot of diverse opinions should you work hard at trying to get them and maintain them. And also, Hoodie didn't necessarily think too much about accessibility in the beginning, because it was more about "Let's help people to build awesome things", but I was mo... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Do you have any things that you did to make it more accessible that you wanna pull off the shelf and talk about? Just bite-sized stories maybe that were small adjustments that really made it more inviting for the community. |
**Charlotte Spencer:** I guess my big thing is language. I'm someone who doesn't use traditional she/her, he/him pronouns, so removing the concept of "guys" out of the dynamic. We're not all "guys", so why are you referring to me as such? |
Ableist language, like "crazy", "insane" and stuff like that... I also have mental health difficulties, and it's really important for me to cultivate an environment in which people are only saying nice things to each other or neutral things to each other. I don't have time for you to say, "Hey guys, check out this craz... |
\[11:44\] It sounds potentially silly to some, but generally just having a nice attitude, which is something that hoodie had already, but I like to think I'm quite nice, and I like to think that my nice attitude rubs off on other people as well. Nothing particularly code related... I don't really talk about code a lot ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Keeping it nice is actually hard. As you get really big, everybody has to be nice, especially people in leadership. It's hard to keep that many people to it, you know? |
**Charlotte Spencer:** I'm saying that I'm a nice person, and hopefully most people would agree, but it's a lot of work. To go back to the Hacktoberfest thing again, a lot of people are really excited about doing their first pull request, but so much so they're not really paying attention. We have 17 people ask to clai... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Oh my gosh! |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah, it's a thing. I have to calmly explain, "Hello, blah-blah-blah" - add in all the usernames so they get a notification... "This has already been solved. Always a good idea to check before you claim something, because I don't want other people to step on other people's toes", because it's qui... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** That's great. We sort of breezed over your first PR there, but I'd actually like to dig in a little bit more about exactly what it is and how it came about. You said that it grew out of Hoodie a bit - can you tell me about that? |
**Charlotte Spencer:** It grew out of Hoodie in the sense that I felt that I had to save space in which to kind of bring out some of my own ideas. Your First PR is a Twitter account - a glorified Twitter account really, which when I have the time I post GitHub issues that I believe to be approachable for a beginner, wh... |
The story behind that is also underwhelming in that I was sitting in this very bedroom, I think I was in my pajamas - I believe that they were polar bear pajamas to be specific - and I got really annoyed because I'd been in open source for six months at this point and I found it really nice and easy to get into. And it... |
\[16:09\] It's a beginner issue for me, who has been working on Hoodie for however many months (over a year now); it's easy for me, but you can't put a beginner issue on something for someone who's never encountered that project. |
So I got angry, and then I did a Twitter account and I started to post good issues. That kind of seemed to have a trickle-down effect, which maintainers in particular -- because although it is for new people to do their first pull request, it's actually a slight sub-tweet to project maintainers, saying "You could do be... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** That's great. It's a great site. |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Oh, it's a very badly designed website. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** But it has this link to this "first-timers only" article that I actually had never read before, from Kent Dodds. It's fantastic. |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah, Kent does great stuff. We kind of started to do similar things like that at the same time, but not knowing of each other. We kind of know of each other now and we support each other's work a little bit. It's good. The more people are talking about this, the better. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Awesome. I think we're gonna go into a break now, but when we get right back we're gonna get into what it's like to be a maintainer. Stick around. |
**Break:** \[17:37\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Charlotte, one of the complaints that I get, even when we... You know, we just did this great thing Code and Learn at Node Interactive where we have 20 people submit their first PR, and a few of the contributors woke up and were a little bit grumpy because they woke up to 20 new PRs that they needed ... |
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