Do you remember your first open-source contribution?

Yves ColinCustomer Engineer Data Management @Google

Do you also contribute to open source?

Not directly at the code level. As an anecdote, I do have one tiny line in a PostgreSQL commit, but that was through Bertrand! It was for a feature where I'd suggested a few ideas to him. Ideally, I'd like to actually free up more time in the future to get more involved and contribute more.

Damien ClochardCo-founder & Product Owner @Dalibo

Do you remember your first open source contribution?

Honestly, I'm not sure. I'm not very nostalgic and I don't really keep track of what I was doing. I imagine it was in the early 2000s. There was one of the very first CMSs called Spip, which worked but had bugs. I think that's how I started getting into it, making early PHP bug fixes. I don't really remember what I was doing back then. Which is a shame, actually.

Ege GüneşTeam Lead, Kubernetes Operators @Percona

Do you remember your first Open Source contribution?

If I remember correctly, my first open source contribution was either to Django REST Framework or Supervisor. In Django REST Framework, I fixed a bug. Around the same time, I also contributed documentation improvements to Supervisor, a Python process management tool. Both happened so close together that I honestly can't remember which one came first. What I do remember is that those early contributions showed me that open source projects were much more accessible than I had imagined. You didn't need to be an expert to get involved. You could start by fixing a bug, improving documentation, or helping with small issues, and gradually build from there.

Matt CornillonData Cloud & AI Specialist @Google

Is that your way of contributing to open source?

Yes, totally. At the beginning, conferences were even my main way of contributing. I started by giving talks in the French community, then pretty quickly in other events. Over time, you meet organizers, other speakers, people from the community, and you naturally get more and more involved. That is how I quickly joined Postgres France and started taking part more actively in the ecosystem. This year, I was lucky enough to be recognized as a contributor. It is not something you necessarily look for at the start, but it comes quite naturally over time.

Cedric VillemainPresident / CEO @Data bene

Do you remember your first contribution?

I think my first contribution was French-language support for tsearch in PostgreSQL. It was patched into the module in version 8.1 and I think it was integrated in 8.2. A few years ago I started receiving little PostgreSQL contributor badges from time to time, which was cool. I've had the feeling of participating for 16 years. I was really happy to get those badges, though I don't make huge numbers of contributions in my own name.

Franck PachotDeveloper Advocate @MongoDB

Your first open source contribution?

My way of contributing to projects is mostly by giving talks or by writing technical articles. I also have a few projects on my GitHub.

Bertrand DrouvotSenior Database Engineer @AWS

How did you get into open source?

It happened through both chance and interest. I worked with Oracle for a very long time, but eventually I got tired of the black-box aspect of it. I already enjoyed sharing scripts with the Oracle community before moving to PostgreSQL. When I discovered PostgreSQL, I became much more serious about it and started building extensions. Later at AWS, I worked in database engineering, which was basically the last line of support. Sometimes we would directly encounter PostgreSQL bugs, and I became interested in trying to fix them. My first PostgreSQL contribution was a bug fix. Most of my work ended up being around logical decoding.