We’re Recruiting Project Maintainers

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Randy Fay

May 21, 2023 4 min read

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Image of a diverse group of maintainers sitting at a table maintaining DDEV

We’re recruiting DDEV Open Source Project Maintainers, both paid and volunteer positions! If you’ve ever considered becoming a more-involved contributor/maintainer on the project you love, we’d love to talk with you. DDEV needs to become more sustainable, with a larger group of maintainers, and we want to grow into that.

Maintainer Job Description

The DDEV community is seeking dedicated and experienced individuals to become a maintainers of the DDEV open source project. This role requires a deep understanding of the DDEV project, great coding skills, and the ability to work collaboratively with a diverse and passionate community.

Responsibilities

  1. Code Review: Review and merge code submissions, ensuring they are high quality, adhere to the project’s coding standards, and align with the project’s direction.

  2. Issue Management: Respond to issues raised by users and other contributors. This includes troubleshooting, bug fixing, and feature development.

  3. Documentation: Maintain and improve the project’s documentation to be comprehensive, up-to-date, and user-friendly.

  4. Release Management: Plan and execute new releases of the project, deciding what features and fixes should be included, testing the release, and managing the release process.

  5. Community Engagement: Foster a positive and inclusive community culture by answering questions, providing support, and engaging with the community.

  6. Project Vision and Strategy: Set the direction for the project, including deciding on the project’s roadmap, setting priorities, and making decisions about the project’s architecture and technologies.

  7. Quality Assurance: Maintain a high level of quality for the project by setting up and maintaining testing frameworks, performing code audits, and ensuring adherence to best practices.

  8. Integration: Ensure the project integrates well with other software and systems, working with other open source projects or commercial software as needed.

  9. Security: Keep the project secure by reviewing and addressing potential security issues, updating dependencies, and following security best practices.

  10. Licensing and Legal Compliance: Ensure the project complies with relevant licenses and legal requirements.

  11. Mentoring: Use successful mentoring and communication skills to guide all participants in the project, fostering a culture of learning and growth.

Qualifications

  • Proven experience with open source project maintenance or similar roles.
  • Strong knowledge of the DDEV project and its technology stack.
  • Growing coding skills in Go, with a strong understanding of Linux, Docker, database technologies, and shell scripting.
  • Understanding and commitment to software development best practices.
  • Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to handle complex technical challenges.
  • Excellent communication and mentoring skills, with the ability to work well with a diverse community and foster a culture of learning and growth.
  • Strong understanding of software security practices.
  • Experience with release management and continuous integration tools.
  • Experience in mentoring and guiding new contributors in a open source community.
  • Familiarity with the open source ecosystem and the dynamics of open source projects.

This individual should be passionate about the benefits of open source, and committed to fostering a community that encourages both user and developer participation.

Compensation

While maintainers may work on the project on a volunteer basis, the community has made clear its intent to create paid positions for the right candidates and to raise the requisite funding for these positions. Compensation will be commensurate with experience and the level of commitment.

How to Apply

You don’t actually “apply,” you grow into these positions. But if becoming a maintainer is interesting to you, let’s talk about it and make a plan! We’ll mentor you, give you responsibilities commensurate with your capabililties, and help you grow into the role. If you’re a PHP developer, you can learn go enough to make significant contributions in a modest amount of time. But perhaps most of the DDEV project is a variety of miscellaneous technologies that you may already have experience with. And understanding the web developer is a fundamental part of DDEV, so if you’re a web developer you’re already part of the way there.

Drop by Discord, the issue queue or send an email to randy.fay (at) ddev.com. We’d love to talk with you about it!

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