FOSSY 2026

Last week, I was in Vancouver for the FOSSY 2026 conference, where I gave a talk about my experience as a new open-source contributor. My experiences as a contributor, and previous conferences I have attended, have mostly been focused on PHP, but FOSSY is a conference about open source software more broadly.

Similarly, most of my talks (excluding "Introduction to Rust for Experienced Software Developers" from ConFoo) have been about PHP. While FOSSY gave me the opportunity to learn about other open source projects, the fact that the conference was not PHP-centric meant that I had to try to make my talk apply to non-PHP projects as well.

My talk, "From First PR to Release Manager: A Path into Open Source", was scheduled in the very first round on Thursday afternoon. Going into the presentation I was pretty nervous - when I had rehearsed the talk the previous day I had finished the presentation in roughly 30 minutes, rather than the scheduled 45 minutes. I was also presenting to a room with very few familiar faces - not only was this the very start of the conference, and my first time attending this conference, but I had arrived at the conference less than an hour before my talk, and so hadn't had a chance to meet many other attendees.

That said, my talk went far better than I had expected. I was able to tell a coherent story about my experiences as a new contributor and the lessons that could be drawn from my journey, both for other contributors and for maintainers of open source projects. The audience had enough questions that I actually went a few minutes over the allotted time! A copy of the slides that I used is available here on my site.

While I wasn't able to stay for the entire conference, the talks that I attended were fascinating, and I look forward to watching the recordings of the talks that I wasn't able to attend. I hope to return to the conference next year.

If I ever give this talk again, I definitely need to update it. I explained that the first roadblock I encountered as an open source contributor was that GitHub tests were not run automatically on my first pull request. However, this weekend I encountered another roadblock even earlier in the process of contributing to an open source project: I couldn't even create a pull request in the first place, since the GitHub project was configured to restrict who could submit new PRs! I'm glad that wasn't the case with the php-src repository; otherwise, I might not have become so involved in open source communities.