Open Source Summit North America 2025

Most of the advice around new contributor experience is oriented towards developers at the beginning of their career - students or those breaking into the tech industry. This time, though, we want to talk about the basics of contribution for senior developers who already have plenty of industry experience. These potential contributors have more than enough technical expertise, but still struggle to participate in open source. For them the barriers tend to be more social and “communicational” than technical, as their previous incentives, goals, and development cultures are fairly different from those present in most open source communities.

As open source contributors working in a big company, we watch our colleagues face these issues. We want to share our experience and what we learned while trying to help these colleagues participate in open source development for the first time.