Episode 178: Maintainer Month with Predrag Gruevski & Kingsley Mkpandiok

Guests Predrag Gruevski | Kingsley Mkpandiok Panelists Richard
Littauer | Eriol Fox Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The
podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long
haul. This is a special podcast and one of several in this series
for Maintainer Month. We’re interviewing maintainers to ask them
about their experience of open source and their experience of
living as maintainers. We’re super excited to have two guests with
us. Our first guest is Predrag Gruevski, who’s the maintainer of
two projects in the Rust ecosystem. Predrag discusses his role as a
maintainer for these projects, and he shares his motivations for
volunteering as a maintainer, the value of making an impact on the
community, and the importance of mentorship. Our next guest is
Kingsley Mkpandiok, who’s a B2B B2C UX Designer, Open Source Design
Advocate, and has contributed to projects like CHAOSS Africa and
OSCAfrica Festival. Kingsley shares his journey as a UX designer
contributing to open source projects in Nigeria, he discusses the
challenges of onboarding designers, shares his approach to creating
a welcoming environment and providing opportunities for designers
to contribute beyond initial tasks. Download this episode now to
hear much more! Predrag: [00:00:46] Predrag discusses his role as a
maintainer of two open source projects in the Rust ecosystem:
cargo-semver-checks and Trustfall. [00:01:13] He explains that
semantic versioning is more critical in Rust due to the language’s
auto traits feature, and breaking changes in Rust can have serious
consequences. [00:03:15] Predrag talks about being a volunteer and
how it provides an opportunity to make a significant impact on the
community while benefiting from the value proposition. [00:06:32]
We hear how Predrag values helping early career individuals break
into software engineering and finding competent individuals who
outperform their peers. [00:08:24] How does Predrag rule out people
who aren’t competent yet? He explains how he’s looking for people
who are outperforming their peers and outperforming their
environment. [00:09:55] Regarding onboarding maintainers, Predrag
discusses marketing mentorship opportunities on GitHub issues and
being open to collaborating with students or individuals interested
in Rust open source tooling. [00:11:15] Predrag acknowledges the
possibility of experiencing burnout as a maintainer. He separates
burnout from mentorship, noting that not everyone may be a good fit
for his mentorship style. He values feedback and growth-oriented
individuals and believes in honest conversations. [00:12:56]
Richard brings up value propositions and Predrag tells us he enjoys
solving hard problems and finding efficient solutions. The question
of value alignment comes up and Predrag clarifies that he sees
himself as a curator of options for the project, providing a menu
of potential directions for new maintainers to choose from.
[00:15:26] Predrag mentions that he plans to integrate
cargo-semvr-checks into the Rust programming language cargo tool,
which would further decentralize the project and make it a
collective effort. [00:17:09] Find out where you can follow Predrag
and his blog on the web. Kingsley: [00:20:21] Our next guest,
Kingsley tells us that he sees himself primarily as a designer
rather than a maintainer. He shares his experience of joining
CHAOSS Africa as his first open source contribution. [00:23:31]
Kingsley tells us it took him about two months to fully understand
how to contribute to CHAOSS Africa, and he emphasizes the
importance of designers being open to problem-solving and looking
for issues to fix within the community. [00:26:16] Regarding
onboarding designers and creating a more inclusive environment,
Kingsley shares his experience in CHAOSS Africa and a document he
created. [00:30:06] Kingsley shares that the one thing he didn’t
expect about working in design was having to handle conflict
resolution among design contributors. [00:31:41] Eriol asks
Kingsley about his vision for change in open source projects and
culture to make design more inclusive. He expresses his desire to
see more designers getting involved in open source projects, and he
encourages designers to see themselves as problem solvers who can
contribute to various aspects of open source. [00:35:10] Find out
where you can follow Kingsley on the web. Quotes Predrag:
[00:04:10] “There’s been multiple prior efforts to build
semver-checks in Rust that have failed for maintainability reasons.
They were harder to keep going.” [00:05:28] “I felt that for a very
small amount of effort, I could have a very large impact on the
community.” [00:07:01] “I’m one of those people that believes that
number of years of experience is an extremely poor predictor of
competence, whether in software or otherwise.” [00:10:10] “I label
issues as ‘e-mentor,’ so that means I’m willing to mentor someone
to take over implementing this issue.” [00:14:11] “I believe in
laying out a menu and saying, hey, which of these ten different
things, ten different directions of taking the project are you
interested in working on?” [00:16:54] “The project will have failed
if twenty years from now I’m the person that has to make every
single one of these decisions.” Kingsley: [00:24:58] “You can’t
contribute to a project you don’t understand.” [00:30:35] “One
thing I didn’t expect [about working in design] is conflict
resolution.” [00:31:22] “I wish someone had told me about the need
for conflict resolution skills and not just design.” [00:34:57]
“There’s no future in open source without design.” Links SustainOSS
(https://sustainoss.org/) SustainOSS Twitter
(https://twitter.com/SustainOSS?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor)
SustainOSS Discourse (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/)
podcast@sustainoss.org (mailto:podcast@sustainoss.org) SustainOSS
Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/tags/sustainoss) Richard Littauer
Twitter
(https://twitter.com/richlitt?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor)
Eriol Fox Twitter (https://twitter.com/EriolDoesDesign) Predrag
Gruevski Twitter
(https://twitter.com/PredragGruevski?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor)
Predrag Gruevski Website (https://predr.ag/) Predrag’s Blog
(https://predr.ag/blog/) Predrag’s blog post-“Mediocrity can be a
sign of excellence, and other stories”
(https://predr.ag/blog/mediocrity-can-be-a-sign-of-excellence/)
Trustfall-GitHub (https://github.com/obi1kenobi/trustfall)
cargo-semver-checks (https://crates.io/crates/cargo-semver-checks)
Kingsley Mkpandiok LinkedIn
(https://ng.linkedin.com/in/iamkingsleey) Kingsley Mkpandiok Medium
(https://iamkingsleey.medium.com/) CHAOSS Africa
(https://chaoss.community/kb/chaoss-africa/) CHAOSS blog post-“How
can designers contribute to an open source project on GitHub?” by
Kingsley Mkpandiok
(https://chaoss.community/how-can-designers-contribute-to-an-open-source-project-on-github/)
CHAOSS Weekly Newsletter (https://chaoss.community/news/) Credits
Produced by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by
Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/)
Show notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound
(https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guests: Kingsley
Mkpandiok and Predrag Gruevski.