2025-09-27 –, Auditorium B001 (170)
Hear our experiences on mentoring new contributors, what common hurdles they face, and how we try to address them. Then, let’s discuss how to reduce the barrier to entry.
While our contribution process may seem familiar and uncomplicated to us, it is very different to what most new developers expect, which leads to several stumbling blocks. That is not a failure of our process, we just need to be explicit what is different, so that these new developers feel able to navigate it on their own.
We, Guinevere Larsen and Arjun Shankar, have been attempting to get new contributors in our respective projects, GDB and glibc, and have collected a series of common stumbling blocks for first time contributors.
The first half of this talk aims to present these stumbling blocks, and then suggestions on how projects can reduce or remove them without affecting established developer workflows. The second half will be dedicated to open discussions on those suggestions and new ones that may come up.
