Vox Pupuli: How did we build a successful open source community?
What happens when critical open source projects aren't maintained anymore?
Vox Pupuli is a group of over 200 individuals, maintaining over 300 projects in the Puppet ecosystem. We all are working together to ensure a continuing development process. Our goal is to adopt abandoned FOSS projects from the Puppet ecosystem and to unite lonely FOSS developers.
In this talk we will do a deep dive into how we build the community and keep it running and why you should participate! We will also discuss how we manage contributions at large scale and how we prevent the next xz desaster!
Vox Pupuli is a very diverse group. We are spread across the whole globe. This means:
- Spread across different timezones
- Everybody is a volunteer. So the amount of available time per person per week varies a lot
- Everybody has a different cultural background
- Everybody has a different technical background
- Everybody has a different motivation for contributing
We learned that we are basically the most complicated remote-first company you can imagine. You cannot predict who is available when. But something unites us: we all aim for a better code quality and a continuous development.
Somehow Vox Pupuli managed to be successful and to even grow over time (from 75 members to over 200 now).
We learned how to make decisions in such an environment, how to document them and how to do separation of concerns. In the talk I will try to explain how we do this and how we use GitHub and why GitHub helps us.
The audience will learn how to scale CI setups (as in: how to handle a huge amount of PRs). They will also get an understanding of how successful remote work is possible and how they can adopt it for their own professional work.
call-to-action: Solo developers in the audience should consider to join or form collective. Also everybody can rethink how they communicate within their company and maybe adopt any of the Vox Pupuli patterns. Or they even join Vox Pupuli.
This talk is the perfect fit for the DevX track. The whole talk is about the developer experience within Vox Pupuli and how others can adopt it to their projects and companies.
Visual Aids: The talk will use slides with multiple graphs/charts.
As a solo developer: How to prevent burnout by joining an Open Source collective?
How to boost your productivity at work by adopting our remote-first patterns!
How do you scale the CI setup in your project to provide fast feedback and handle lots of PRs
- April 16: Call for sessions (CFS) opens
- May 10: CFS closes
- Late July: Speakers are notified of submission status
- Early September: Universe agenda announced
- August - October: Accepted speakers will develop their session content
- October 28-30: Universe 2024 ✨
What does developer experience mean to you? Less friction, more productivity? Finding more time for creativity, collaboration, and innovation? How do you stay in the flow? How do you leverage GitHub’s platform and features? We are looking for industry experts and impactful practitioners who are driving collaboration, simplifying tech stacks, reducing onboarding times, and prioritizing developer-first security for the betterment of their teams, their customers, their careers, and their communities.
Most of these sessions feature presentations and live demos as well as audience engagement through questions, group discussions, polls, and games.
Tim „bastelfreak“ Meusel became a Senior Automation IT Consultant in July 2021. Previously, he worked as a DevOps Engineer for GoDaddy EMEA in Cologne, Germany, where he developed and maintained a big public cloud platform. Tim is the driving force behind various open source projects. He founded the VirtAPI-Stack and is a very active Vox Pupuli Maintainer and Project Management Committee member. Tim has been doing work in the DevOps area since 2009 and began persuing Puppet solutions in 2012. He was elected to serve on the Vox Pupuli Project Management Committee in 2016 and was reelected multiple times.
When Tim isn't working he enjoys hiking through the mountains or cooking with and for friends.