Lessons Learned from Cultivating Open Source Projects and Communities
Open source projects and communities are the backbone of modern software development, yet the human side of building and sustaining them is rarely discussed as openly as the technology itself. In this episode, Chris is joined by JJ Asghar, Developer Advocate at IBM (yes, his email really is awesome@ibm.com), who shares hard-won lessons from over a decade cultivating open source projects and communities.
JJ’s journey began tending the FAQ for CRUX, a stripped-down BSD-style Linux distribution, before moving on to the OpenStack-Chef project — building clouds at scale — and later contributing to and leading efforts in the Kubernetes, Tekton, and Istio ecosystems, with a current focus on OpenShift.
Key lessons from this episode include:
- Scope is everything: One of the hardest challenges for any open source project is defining what it is and, equally importantly, what it is not. Projects that try to absorb everything lose their identity; those scoped too narrowly never find their community.
- Soft skills matter more than technical skills: Anyone can learn a technology. Knowing how to communicate, resolve conflict, and bring people along on a shared vision is what separates maintainers who burn out from those who build enduring communities.
- Be kind to your maintainers: Open source contributors typically give their own time out of passion. Recognising and respecting that effort — as a user, contributor, or enterprise consumer — is foundational.
- Respect the project’s goals: As JJ puts it, anyone can be involved in open source, but you need to decide whether you are willing to work towards the goals of the project, or whether a fork or a separate effort is the right path.
- Failures are part of the journey: Not every project succeeds and not every community sustains itself. JJ shares openly about both the successes and the “horrible failures”, making this one of the more candid conversations about what it actually takes.
A must-listen for anyone contributing to, maintaining, or considering starting an open source project — and equally valuable for enterprise teams thinking about their relationship with the open source projects they depend on.
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