Maintainer Stories — Katrina Owen

I never expected to be an open-source
maintainer I was just scratching an itch
I wrote a little project that was doing
a thing because I needed a thing, and
then it got a bunch of attention and a
bunch of people started using it and
suddenly I found myself in a situation
where I was managing all of this chaos
and I totally didn't have the skills to do
that so I've spent the past three years
trying to figure out what skills are
actually involved in managing an
open-source project as opposed to just
writing code, which is really different.
My name is Katrina Owen, and I
maintain a project called exercism.io.
Exercism is a platform for
practicing programming languages or
ramping up very quickly in a new
programming language. I spent a year
writing curriculum for one of a
developer training programs and so I
wrote Exercism as a little app to help
do work that we needed done at work.
About a year ago someone on the open-source team here
at GitHub reached out to me.
They wanted someone whose main focus could be
open-source maintainers and that
they wanted that to be someone who is an
open-source maintainer.
Part of my job is to go out, talk
to other open-source maintainers about
how their projects are going — what's
working what's not what's hard
what's missing in the tools that exist —
and help bring all of that knowledge
back into GitHub and figure out how we
can make life better for maintainers.
I live out in Texas in the boonies and I
come into San Francisco a couple times
three times a year to collaborate with
my team have meetings and all that and
also to meet with open-source maintainers who live
here work here. I've met a lot of really
great people working on open-source.
People who are genuine and thoughtful
and helpful.
I've learned
so much about empathy and communication
and asking better questions, and I don't
think I would have had that
without open-source.

Maintainer Stories — Katrina Owen

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