The ReadME Project amplifies the voices of the open source community: the maintainers, developers, and teams whose contributions move the world forwar

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2024-02-13 10:30:01

The ReadME Project amplifies the voices of the open source community: the maintainers, developers, and teams whose contributions move the world forward every day.

Mathematics teacher Sarah Rainsberger wasn’t planning to become an open source contributor when she started rebuilding her choir’s website. She just wanted to learn JavaScript and web development for fun. “I wasn't a programmer, but I often found I was the only remotely technical person in a group,” she explained. “That’s how I ended up building the choir website in the first place.”

She settled on using the front-end framework Astro, which was brand new at the time. It had fewer resources for learners than more established frameworks, but she thought following along as the project grew would be a good way to learn. She soon found herself contributing a small piece of code—a configuration file—to the project. Then, as the project grew, Rainsberger became increasingly involved with the community, fielding questions and supporting new Astro users. “I wasn’t the person who knew the most about the inner workings of the project, but I knew how to explain stuff and guide people through the learning process,” she says. “And I knew who to ask when there was something I didn’t know.”

Today, Rainsberger is part of Astro’s core maintainer group. But she still isn’t particularly involved in the codebase, even as she’s deepened her web development skills. As the documentation lead, she spends her time helping others learn the ins and outs of Astro.

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