Episode two of the Sudo Show, and we threw out most of our original outline because the community conversation after episode one made it clear what people actually wanted to hear: how do you get started contributing to open source.
Brandon and I both came at this from different angles. He has been involved since he was about 12 years old, installing Red Hat Linux 5 on the family computer and getting told by a Solaris admin that Linux was a poor man’s Unix. I came at it from the systems administrator side, googling how to be a better Linux sysadmin during a rough day and discovering that most of the results were about people and community, not technical skills. That distinction became the spine of the episode.
The biggest myth we wanted to take apart is that open source contribution means code. It does not. We talked through real examples: a high school English teacher who contributes to GitLab’s documentation specifically because he is not technically biased and can spot confusing language a developer would never notice. Brandon’s own two-line pull request adding hardware support to a presentation remote tool he actually used. Funding models like Patreon, LibrePay, and Tidelift that let you redirect money you were already spending on proprietary cloud tools toward the open source maintainers building what you actually use.
We also got into something that still bugs me: the idea that telling someone to “RTFM” is acceptable community behavior. It is not. Everyone was new once, and a community that treats curiosity as an annoyance is a community that stops growing.
Listen to Sudo Show Episode 2: Getting Started With Open Source
If episode one set the stage, this is the episode where the show found its actual voice: less industry analysis, more practical guidance for anyone wondering where they fit in a community this large.