Maintainers share their stories for Maintainer Month

5 days ago 3

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Panel discussion on AI room at LF Members Summit 2023

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Stories from maintainers

Akihiro Sudo @AkihiroSuda

I’m Akihiro Suda, a software engineer at NTT in Japan. I’ve been a contributor and a maintainer of several projects related to container virtualization on Linux for almost a decade: Docker, BuildKit, containerd, runc, nerdctl, and Lima. Read story
Alejandra Gonzalez @blyxyas

I’m Alejandra, one of the people that maintains Clippy, Rust’s official linter. At the end of the day we’re humans managing human work. With people that deserve their reviews, reviews that deserve their quality assurance (in a timely manner) and users that deserve that their issues be resolved. Read story
Alex Gaynor @alex

My name is Alex, and I’ve been involved in open source software for more than 15 years. My first contribution was to Django, the Python web framework. Read story
Alexander Brandes @NotMyFault

These days, I’m primarily involved in the Jenkins project. I contribute to Jenkins Core, maintain several plugins, and help with weekly and Long Term Support (LTS) releases. I also serve on the Jenkins governance board, where I work on community processes, release coordination, and broader project direction. Read story
Alexander Makarov @samdark

OpenSource to me is one of the ways I contribute to the world. I’m maintaining the Yii framework. Doing that since 2010 and love it. I use it myself, I speak about it, I was invited to many places in the world to talk about it, knew great people because of it and love interacting with our team and community overall. Read story
Alexander Todorov @atodorov

My name is Alex, a software quality engineer and fellow open source contributor from Bulgaria. At present I am a co-organizer of FOSDEM’s Testing and Continuous Delivery devroom and the project lead for Kiwi TCMS – a popular test management system. Read story
Amr Hesham @AmrDeveloper

I am the creator and maintainer of GitQL, LLQL, ClangQL, LinkHub, TurtleGraphics and some other nice projects, and I contribute almost daily to the LLVM foundation, especially in Clang, which is a C/C++ compiler and in the past, I contributed to other projects like Rust analyzer, CheckStyle, etc.. Read story
Andreas Happe @andreashappe

I’m a web developer gone penetration-tester gone phd student focusing on how to use LLMs for offensive security. Currently I work on hackingBuddyGPT and cochise. I am also the leader for two OWASP Top 10 lists: the OWASP Top 10 Proactive Controls and the upcoming OWASP OT Top 10. Read story
Andrey Petrov @shazow

My first big open source project was urllib3. Today it’s used by almost every Python user and receives almost a billion downloads each month, but it started in 2007 out of necessity. Read story
Camila Maia @camilamaia

I’m the founder of Cumbuca Dev, a community-driven educational initiative focused on helping people from underrepresented groups gain real experience in tech, especially through Open Source. I’ve seen firsthand how Open Source can break barriers, provide opportunities, and allow people from all walks of life to shine. Read story
Cezar Augusto @cezaraugusto

I’m Cezar Augusto, and I created Extension.js, an open-source tool that makes it very easy to create cross-browser extensions. I’ve always had a philosophical view of Open Source — the idea of software being shared with the intent of being useful to others, the ability to contribute to projects from all over the world, and knowing that something you built can positively impact people you may never meet in person. Read story
Chew Kean Ho @hollowaykeanho

I’m (Holloway) Chew, Kean Ho – a maintainer stewarding some fun applications, some serious tools, and my own legal licenses since 2023. At the moment I’m involved with FireGiant via My AutomataCI end-to-end automation tools. Read story
Daniel Stenberg @bagder

I got involved in creating a small tool for downloading content over HTTP in late 1996, and it did not take long until the side thing became my main spare time project. In the spring of 1998 we renamed that project to curl and a special journey had started for real. Oh, and by that time the term Open Source was also coined so now we had a term for what we were doing! Read story
Daniele Scasciafratte @mte90

My name is Daniele Scasciafratte, and I started contributing to open source projects over ten years ago. My journey began in 2013 with Mozilla and in 2015 with WordPress. Currently, I am serving my second term on the council of the Italian Linux Society and am part of the maintainer group for the Amber language. I have written a free and open source book titled “Contribute to Open Source the Right Way.” Read story
Darshan Sen @RaisinTen

I’m Darshan Sen, an award-winning Governance Member of high-profile Open Source projects such as Node.js and Electron. The idea that anyone, anywhere, could improve a software that thousands or even millions use every day, really captivated me. Read story
David Mohundro @drmohundro

I’m David Mohundro and my most well known open source project is SWXMLHash. By publishing what I had learned in the open, I was able to share with the community. One of the things I love about open source – the projects can take on a life of their own! Read story
Fabio Caccamo @fabiocaccamo

To me, Open Source is more than just sharing code, it’s about learning continuously and staying in sync with the rapid evolution of technology. Compared to when I started coding ~20 years ago, the pace of change today is staggering. Open Source helps me keep up. These days, I focus primarily on Python and Django (my favorite technologies to work with and the ones I know best). Over the years, I have published around 20 Open Source projects. Read story
Francesco Bianco @francescobianco

For me, open source is a guiding compass that has shaped not only my career but my philosophy toward technology and collaboration. With numerous ideas bubbling in my mind, I channeled my enthusiasm into creating a local, independent organization called Javanile—a name combining “Java” and “Nile” (the river). Read story
Henry Zhu @hzoo

I didn’t create Babel. Someone else made it. What happened was I just showed up. I answered some questions in the issues and did some basic docs. I didn’t even know the project well. I was just interested, and everyone was using it. They put my name on a blog post saying “Thank you for contributing.” I felt almost guilty because I barely did anything, but it actually made me want to do more. Read story
Iman Tumorang @bxcodec

I became a “Curious Engineer” who is always learning new things and creating new things. Some popular Go libraries I maintain include go-clean-arch and faker. When I attend Golang community meetups, people talk about the code I made; they praise it and even tell me that they use it as a standard in their company. This is what it feels like to make an impact. Read story
Jakub T. Jankiewicz @jcubic

I created my first bigger OSS project called jQuery Terminal, which I’m still maintaining. I created a few Open Source projects that were somewhat successful, like Wayne, Sysend, Tagger, LIPS Scheme, Gaiman, and chat-gpt Bookmarklet. But my biggest project that I’m a maintainer of is isomorphic-git. It’s a pure JavaScript implementation of a git version control client. Read story
James A. Bednar @jbednar

I am the original founder of the HoloViz.org project, which provides open-source Python libraries for scientific, engineering, and analytical data exploration and visualization, PyViz.org, which catalogs all the open visualization tools available for Python, and Pandata.pydata.org, which provides a curated set of highly scalable data processing tools. Read story
Jamie Tanna @jamietanna

Perhaps the main project that folks may know is oapi-codegen, the OpenAPI-to-Go code generator, and dependency-management-data, a tool for better understanding your dependency tree. I’ve also previously been the primary maintainer for the Jenkins job-dsl-plugin, and on the maintainer team for Wiremock, and I’ve had contributor access to several projects over the last decade, and I’m also a fairly regular contributor to a number of other projects like Renovate. Read story
Jens Klingenberg @Foso

The two biggest projects I’m maintaining are: Jetpack Compose Playground, a community-driven collection of Jetpack Compose example code and tutorials, and Ktorfit, an HTTP client generator / KSP plugin for Kotlin Multiplatform. Read story
Juan Cruz Viotti @jviotti

I’m Juan Cruz Viotti. I’m a member of the JSON Schema Technical Steering Committee, O’Reilly author (Unifying Business Data and Code: Designing Data Products with JSON Schema), award-winning University of Oxford alumnus, and founder of Sourcemeta. Some of my notable open source current work includes Blaze, a high-performance C++ JSON Schema validator, a JSON Schema CLI designed for maintaining large JSON Schema ontologies, the Learn JSON Schema popular documentation site, and JSON BinPack, an on-going research project for space-efficient IoT data transfer. Read story
Jürgen Gmach @jugmac00

I became the maintainer of a 14-year-old custom intranet application built on the Zope / Python 2 stack. Python 2 support ended in 2020, which meant I needed to migrate the application to Python 3. I learned about a tool that automatically creates different environments for your libraries and runs the test suite for each configuration. The tool is called tox. After a while, the maintainer of tox announced me as a maintainer myself! Read story
Karl Horky @karlhorky

I’m Karl Horky (GitHub, LinkedIn), Technical Founder at UpLeveled – tech education programs for all skill levels. In an educational landscape of AI-generated solutions, disconnected islands of knowledge and barriers to entry, I focus on helping students level up by designing accessible curricula and contributing to open source. Read story
Kriti Godey @kgodey

I’m Kriti Godey, project lead and one of the maintainers of Mathesar, an intuitive UI that makes Postgres databases easier for non-technical users to work with. We set up Mathesar Foundation (with generous support from Reid Hoffman) and now I’m both the project lead of Mathesar and CEO of the foundation. Read story
Leandro Moreira @leandromoreira

Digital Video Introduction has become one of my most recognized projects. It offers an approachable yet comprehensive guide to understanding digital video technology. I break down complex media concepts using clear explanations and visualizations. What makes me particularly proud is seeing it translated into multiple languages and watching developers worldwide contribute to our shared mission of demystifying video technology. Read story
Leonardo Javier Russo @lrusso

I’m working on LlamaWebServer, a web server that allows you to run an AI model locally and has a UI similar to WhatsApp. Also I’m working on Emulatrix, a Web that allows you to play retro games on a Web browser and where you can upload and download your saved games. Read story
Lu Fei @sy-records

I created projects like Simps and PHPMQTT, and actively contributed to several open-source projects including Docsify, Hyperf, Swoole, Typecho, and Apache Answer. From being a user to becoming a contributor, and eventually a maintainer of open source projects, this journey has profoundly changed my career path and shaped my understanding of the tech world. Read story
Lukasz Gornicki @derberg

I’m active in the AsyncAPI Initiative, and my highest priority is the AsyncAPI spec and the AsyncAPI Generator. At the moment, I’m the Executive Director of the initiative, but I’m stepping down in favour of our new Governance Board. Read story
Martin Costello @martincostello

I’m a maintainer of multiple Open Source projects: Polly – a .NET resilience and transient fault handling library; Swashbuckle.AspNetCore – OpenAPI tools for documenting APIs built with ASP.NET Core; HttpClient Interception – a library for intercepting and mocking HTTP requests for .NET applications; and xunit Logging – An logging library for xUnit.net to route application logs to the tst output. Read story
Mike McQuaid @MikeMcQuaid

I’m Mike McQuaid, the Project Leader for Homebrew and CTPO of Workbrew. Contributors have been a huge part of Homebrew’s success. Our contributor to maintainer ratio is >100:1. We’ve achieved some of this with automation and some of it just trying to make it as easy as possible to contribute and get feedback without needing a human to help. Most of our contributors are great. Read story
Nick Taylor @nickytonline

I’m Nick Taylor (@nickytonline), a Developer Advocate and software engineer based in Montreal, Canada. Over the past several years, open source has been the thread connecting every chapter of my career — from learning new technologies to building communities and landing roles at companies like Forem (the team behind DEV), Netlify, OpenSauced, and now Pomerium, where open source continues to be at the core of my work. Read story
Niklas Merz @NiklasMerz

My name is Niklas Merz and I got the opportunity to work on a mobile app built with web technologies and this led me down a path to joining a project management committee (PMC) of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) project Cordova. Lately I really enjoy sharing my expertise as Co-Chair of the W3C WebView Community Group to improve the core technology that made Cordova possible. Read story
Nolan Lawson @nolanlawson

My first major Open Source project was PouchDB, a JavaScript database. I love Open Source, and I’m grateful for the friends and experiences I’ve gained from it, as well as the talented pool of other Open Source maintainers who keep the whole system humming. I do believe, though, that we maintainers should take some responsibility for the software we’ve built, and to be cognizant of the way the rest of the world has grown to rely on it. Read story
Patrick Heneise @PatrickHeneise

I’ve created a few pet projects and libraries – GitHub Actions and workflows for managing real-world events and meetups (called GitEvents), and developer tooling for Vercel, GitHub, and Cloudflare. I don’t think of these as projects I “maintain” – they’re more like gardens I tend to when I have time, with no pressure or obligation. If someone finds them useful, that’s a wonderful bonus. Read story
Petr Korolev @skywinder

My journey into open source began over a decade ago when I created the GitHub Changelog Generator. For me, Open Source is about freedom, community, and shared progress. It’s a space where collaboration fuels innovation, and where everyone has the power to improve and build on each other’s work. Read story
Pradumna Saraf @Pradumnasaraf

I am Pradumna Saraf, an Open Source Developer/DevRel based out in India. I am also a Docker Captain, a DevOps and Golang Developer. I am passionate about Open Source and have mentored hundreds of people to break into the ecosystem. People in the community know me for the content I create on X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn, educating others about Open Source and DevOps tools. I also enjoy engaging with people in person and delivering talks at conferences. Read story
Raphael Simon @raphael

I’m Raphaël Simon, the creator of Goa, which you can find at goa.design. It’s a design-first framework that helps with building APIs and microservices in Go. Today, it generates complete scaffolding for HTTP and gRPC services, automatically creates OpenAPI documentation, and builds strongly typed client libraries that make working with APIs simpler and safer. We’re expanding support for Server-Sent Events (SSE), making it easier to build Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers using Goa. Read story
Sanjaya Kumar Saxena @sanjayaksaxena

Open Source is not just about code availability—it is a powerful philosophy of collaborative innovation. To me, as a builder, tinkerer, and maintainer of the winkJS project in Javascript and its flagship library winkNLP, Open Source represents freedom with responsibility. The work continues today with winkComposer—a real-time streaming-analytics framework. Just as our earlier work in NLP aimed to democratize language processing, winkComposer seeks to transform how developers work with continuous streams of data. Read story
Shai Mishali @freak4pc

I’m most known as the maintainer of RxSwift and many other frameworks and libraries related to Combine, Apple’s first-party Reactive framework. For me, Open Source is the best way for you to become the best version of yourself. Learn, teach, give back, and grow for yourself as a result of this incredible journey. Read story
Swastik Baranwal @Delta456

I’ve been part of The V Programming Language since the beginning of my Open Source journey. I also maintain a personal project called Box CLI Maker. I actively contribute to the WebDriver ecosystem—including Selenium, Appium, and WebDriverIO—as part of my work with LambdaTest OSPO. Beyond that, I’m involved with projects like the TODO Group, charm, nixpkgs, catppuccin, and others. Read story
Thomas Poignant @thomaspoignant

I started with a small library called scim-patch, and now I spend most of my time around feature flags I am building GO Feature Flag, a feature flag platform that works with all your favorite languages and is integrated easily in any company tech. I am also part of the OpenFeature technical committee. OpenFeature provides an open specification that provides a vendor-agnostic, community-driven API for feature flagging that works with any management tool or in-house solution. Read story
Wasiq Bhamla @WasiqB

I’m Wasiq Bhamla, a Software Quality Assurance Engineer and Open Source maintainer and contributor for almost a decade. I am passionate about building Testing tools and frameworks that empower the QA community.Projects which I am maintaining include: Boyka Framework, Boyka CLI, Multiple Cucumber HTML Reporter, and Maven Publish Action. Read story