 So today, everyone, I want to take you on a journey from being a zero contributions to being one of the top contributors to the Backstage open source project. So who am I? Well, I'm Andre. I'm a Canadian software developer based out of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and I've spent exclusively my entire career working in Microsoft Technologies. Now let's set the stage to this journey. I approached Backstage with zero types of experience, zero react experience, zero node experience. So I did not know the tech stack whatsoever. I also worked in an organization, though open to open source did not have an open source policy. And as a rule follower, that was a little bit of a challenge for me. So you're probably thinking, well, Andre, this talk is about how you're a top contributor. How did you approach this? Like how did you tackle that conundrum you had? Well, I started out with something simple, logging issues. We were running off of a fork. We were using Azure DevOps server on prem, which didn't work with Backstage at the time. And so we had forked it and we made fixes to get that working for us. And so I logged issues with as much detail as possible so that potentially other contributors could pick that up or potentially the maintainers could pick that up. So that was like the first step that I took. In parallel to that, I also joined the Discord community, initially lurking as you do in an online community. You don't really know all the things. And so I lurked. Then I started asking questions. And then as I felt more comfortable, I started answering questions and helping others as a way to contribute to the Pax, to the project. Finally, legal managed to carve out a loophole for me to be able to contribute to the project. I was elated. This is pretty amazing because we were putting a lot of maintenance into running a fork, which isn't the supported path. And it meant that we could contribute and get off that and make our lives a lot easier. Plus it felt great to be part of a project. So you're probably wondering, well, what was your first contribution to the project? Well, it was pretty easy. I went back to those issues that I had logged previously and worked on those. They were things that I understood. I knew the code that needed to be changed. And I felt confident contributing those changes as I knew they were tested. I knew they worked well. From there, I dove into the deep end and contributed a plug-in. I did have a little bit of foresight in this. I took a look at what all needed to be contributed. And I broke it up into smaller chunks, initially contributing the back end plug-in first and then from there doing the front end. This gave me the opportunity to learn how a larger contribution rolls out within an open-source project and how the review process works for something larger. Another opportunity I had that I found was great was Hacktoberfest. In the month of October, you would see all these people sort of getting energy into contributing to open-source. You'd have issues tagged, you know, good first issue or help wanted. And you'd see all these people contributing and that was another opportunity to really get involved in the project. And like the slide says, who doesn't like saving the environment? Right now, they will plant a tree for every pull request that gets merged, which is pretty awesome. So now, I've been working on the project for a while. And I found over the last 12 months or so, a lot of my contributions come from working with the community, helping people on Discord, looking over issues and so seeing small bugs that need to be fixed or working on documentation. So a lot of my contributions come from this sort of loop of helping people out, seeing what opportunities there are and contributing from there. So here's the data. The Linux Foundation Tracks has like a great dashboard for the backstage project and other projects as well. And this one you can see I'm in the sort of the top five, along with a bunch of other names. I think Aramis who just spoke is on this list as well. It's quite an honor to be here. This stats are pretty cool. It's a sort of holistic mix of, you know, working on contributing code, helping out on issues and reviewing pull requests. So it's not just simply, oh, well, you contributed so many lines of code and you're on the top of the list. And with that, I just want to say thank you, everyone. Really appreciate your time. Pronto, pronto. Yes. Thank you for everything you do, André, as well as all the contributors in this room. Before we all adjourn to lunch, any questions for André? We have a bit of time. Hi, thanks for that. You mentioned about, you know, get the initial permission from legal, et cetera to be able to contribute in the first place on behalf of your company. I think that was a small bit you did. How did you convince them of the value that this gives the company versus the risk that potentially comes from that? Because that's something that we would like to do, but obviously we need to go through those hurdles, too. Yeah, I would say I was in a lucky position. The whole fact that we were running on a fork, I could easily count up how many hours were being spent on that versus not having to and like the maintenance cost. Because the company saw value in backstage. That really wasn't the problem. So that, again, in my situation, that was the key. I'd have to think on it further if I wasn't my specific experience.