 All right, hey guys, how's it going? Hi, Jory. Hi, Jordan. Hi, Adam. Hi, Dan. How's it going? Hi, Dan. Hey, Adam, how are you doing? Good. How are you doing? All right. It is so good to see your shining faces. It's so funny to run into you guys here. I know. I was just hanging out on Google and I noticed you two were online. So we just saw each other a few weeks ago for our Boku Fest, but it's really good to see you guys again online, I wish you were here all the time. So anyway, you know what I was thinking about today? I was thinking about how to help other people get started contributing to open source. And so, you know, you guys are pretty active in the community, so I thought, hey, why not talk to Adam and Dan? Those guys. Yeah, those guys. You guys seem to know a thing or two about it, so. A little bit here and there. Yeah, so I was curious if, like, you know, Adam, Dan, if you guys could share your stories and, you know, kind of talk about. Yeah, I would love to, in fact. So I got involved in open source through IRC, which is Internet Relay Chat. And once upon a time, I had to go there because I had some jQuery questions. And I kind of just stuck around there and sort of answering other people's jQuery questions and meeting people who made jQuery and learning more about JavaScript and jQuery and going to conferences and then gradually knowing the answers to questions and meeting more and more people. And then, I mean, it just sort of just grew and grew and grew from there. And now I like have a lot of, do a lot of work on various aspects of jQuery foundation. Well, you're serving now Adam as the developer relations guy for jQuery. So I'm sure you probably get a lot of questions about, you know, from people who want to get involved and kind of, like, you know, maybe don't know how or whatever. Yeah. It's also like I was there a few years ago when you, it depends on your background, I think. A lot of people want, like a lot of people come to open source with like a strong background in not open source and, you know, using Linux and all these things. But a lot of people also come to open source from like, oh, I learned some HTML, I learned like how to screw around with WordPress template, like, sort of not comfortable on the command line, not comfortable with like version control. And it makes open source seem kind of like intimidating when you get there. And for people in the second camp, that's kind of who I want to help demystify the process for. So, like, people who may feel like me, actually, frankly, coming to Voku was really intimidating to try and like get started and get involved in the community. And they're sort of like, oh, these people are so smart and, you know, they really know what they're doing. And I'm just a beginner. I'm kind of a noob. And so, you know, like, it is, I think, intimidating to try and like break in, you know, so to speak. So, it's like, almost everyone seems to speak a different language, or at least like a dialect. Yeah. I think, and I think to that point, like the one of the most important things you can do is know that everyone started somewhere. And it's okay to kind of be where you are, and it's okay to ask questions if you are sort of just waiting in, and you don't quite know what people mean. Most people will explain, like, if you ask a genuine question. So, that's like, yeah, I think I found that to be true. Dan, were you like really intimidated when you kind of broke into the community? Yeah, it was also more, I think for me, the where do I start? And so, I got involved, I started helping out on like Stack Overflow, because I wanted to try to like sharpen my skills and learn more. And then I started, you know, I was like, I saw, oh, jQuery has like a support channel, and I got into there. And Adam was in there, I think 22 hours a day about helping people, he's always around. Him and Paul, I was for like the two that I started talking to a lot, and they actually kind of like, you know, held my hand through the process of like getting into helping out with open source and helping out with jQuery and that kind of stuff. And so, but getting into that, it was like, I don't know, you know, they're talking about Git, but then it's like, how am I going to contribute to this? Where's the needs? How, where do I even start? What can I do? And so, it was very just difficult to like find a footing in that and find a spot where I could like try to actually contribute anything worthwhile, because there's also the feeling of like, oh, these people are also smart. Certainly, I couldn't contribute anything that would be a value to them. And so, it was intimidating and hard at the beginning, which is a good thing to go for. And so, you find your like foot in the door, so to speak, like, I mean, what, how did you figure out, oh, this is the thing I know, I can do this? At the time, help, at the time, Paul got me into jQuery Y. And so, from there, I was able to have people, you know, point out things that I could do in little chunks which are worth specifically like, it's like, hey, you know, let's help me out with this. Colin Stover was another one who like got me into like working with jQuery bugs. And he was patient with the fact that I didn't, I didn't know near as much as he did. And let me, you know, do little things to help or try out. And even like with the bug tracker, it was like just curating bugs, like going through the ones that are bogus that people put in that are just like, you broke my site, close, you know, like that kind of stuff, just help out. Yeah, I mean, Adam probably has the best perspective on like that kind of thing, what do you think? I just think help is a great way also to kind of acclimate yourself, because a lot of the times, the thing that you know is you have some familiarity with a tool and you, but you also don't know everything about it. So if you go and try to find the people who are having trouble at any given moment in time, like a support channel or a forum or on GitHub issues or wherever, if you go and try and find the people who are having trouble, you'll either reinforce the things you already know in the process of explaining to them what the problem is, or you'll find new things about the thing that you didn't already know, or you will be in a position to have identified something broken about it and say to the people, hey, I don't know why this is broken, but at the very least, I was trying to help people and now there's this bug. So how do we go about fixing it? So helping other people is awesome because not only do they get the answers to their problems, but it can really round out your knowledge. I agree with that 100%, because that's, I mean, that's definitely where I got started with jQuery support and helping people. And there were those times where it's like, I thought I knew everything when I first started it. I thought, oh yeah, I'm a bad ass. And then I found out that I knew nothing. And so there's definitely those moments where I was corrected by like, you know, who's this age, a piano guy, and like, why does he keep correcting me? But you dig into it and you figure it out. But one of the exciting things working with Adam was like, starting to find out areas where we might be able to take that experience of trying to find that footing and actually apply it to making it better. Which, you know, that was the, I think that's the other part is like, you learn how to help people because you've gone through it. And by helping people, you find out better ways to make the project successful. Definitely. And then you guys have like done a great deal of work more recently. I think Adam, Dan, with like the developer summit that you did a few months ago and all that sort of stuff to bring people in. And I wasn't able to go. But that sounds like it was like probably really great way, I think, for people to meet the team and feel like good about getting involved and not feeling like maybe that intimidation factor as well. Like meeting people offline was probably a pretty cool and good experience for those folks. In general, I think it helps. And this is maybe a tall order for people, especially if people are just getting started. But it does help to kind of find ways online or offline to interact with people who are involved in the project you want to be involved with. And it's in maybe like subject, like not necessarily talking about problems or anything, but just creating relationships that mean when you go to solve problems, you have a much better sense of where someone is coming from as a person. Then like the only time you ever interact with someone is when you're trying to point out something that's broken in their open source project. Yeah, I can't imagine that like makes too many friends all the time. Yeah, I like to see that. Not being a great way to make friends, but I think making friends is a big part of why it's fun to get involved in a community or in a project because I think certainly like I've met people going to jQuery events and hanging out on the channel and trying to learn and contribute. It's obviously not unique to jQuery. Everything node has it and obviously beyond JavaScript just has it. It's kind of just about finding that you're the nation of the internet that you want to join and then sort of setting up your home there. It is in a way like moving to a new city. It's like, all right, I'm here now and I say this is someone who's never moved to a new city. I've lived in New York my entire life, but hypothetically, you know, you get there and you're like, all right, well, I'm here and now what? You start like uncovering the map and removing the fog of war. And GitHub is obviously a great way also to kind of start learn the lay of the land. I remember when I was getting started with jQuery, there was no GitHub and everyone was using Google code or source for it or things like that that were just less, they felt less open, they weren't necessarily, it's kind of a common, there's a weird sort of synergy between like GitHub's explosion and people getting involved in open source because that strong draw has, and the slogan of like anyone can do it makes you feel like, well, I should probably be able to do this as opposed to like having to hunt down subversion repos online and well, you know, I'm not even ready to contribute, so why would I even bother? Which kind of brings to mind, Dan, you should talk about what we've been doing to find ways for people to contribute that are not writing code. No, definitely. Yeah. Before we, before we segue into that, there is one thing because we were on the topic of it and just before we put it to us, but anyway, something that was unique and this is to Adam's credit, which is why I want to like point it out is because the hack day that we had that developer conference, you know, where we were all together, our developer summit that we had, God, what was that? October? October, yeah. It was so unique in that sense of like it was just people coming together to work on a project and I feel like that's something unique, a little bit in the community versus just people getting together for a conference or hanging out and I was just a consumer of this, like Adam's the one that like put his blood, sweat and tears in this thing, but it was just amazing to see that many people working on open source together and so I think when you get into that scenario where you see like the fever of it and you're seeing other people and you're actually seeing them, it's really impactful too. But see that too, like you see where people have limitations and so as far as content goes, we worked really hard to take the content that we have, not just code, but like all of our websites and documentation was a big thing. If you wanted to help out with jQuery documentation, you had to have like our, God, what was that on a media wiki? You had to have a user account. You had to, I don't know, I guess it was in WordPress and edit XML in the WordPress post and if you ruined it, like the whole site would take and just all these problems just to contribute. So you couldn't. And if you were someone who maybe was a fantastic co-writer or someone who is great at proofing or copywriting or anything that's not code, you couldn't really, so yeah, like Adam. I'm only picking up drips and drabs of what you're saying. Yeah, sadly, Dan seems to have frozen briefly. Maybe he'll come back to us in just a second. Maybe, Dan? Am I back? I'm loading chat so I can like give you a talk. Oh good, yeah, now it looks like you're back. So you were saying, I think you cut out at the point you were saying, if you were someone who was a fantastic technical writer, and that was sort of the last time. Okay, yeah, like so we're to that point someone that was really good at things not code related specifically, but creating copy or proofing stuff, the door was shut on you to some degree because it was so difficult to get in and make changes or submit stuff. You just had to hunt someone down and say, hey I think this is this is bogus. So there's a lot of work into changing that and Adam's one that's been really working it like organizing that and getting success and I mean it's been something that's been on the plate for two or three years that like rich imitation a long time ago, like trying to get that into GitHub and what that would look like and it's been a really big process, but it's actually like working and successful. Why don't you talk about the part of it, Adam? Yeah, so what we've done at jQuery is we've put all of our sites into a single WordPress install that you can run locally and develop against and then all of our content or almost all of our content at this point is stored in static content repos so it's anyone like none of the stuff lives in a database and anyone can contribute to it and anyone can contribute to it in a kind of drastic change kind of ways because you're isolated in your own development environment and it's kind of similar to Jekyll or a static site generator which as a technique for deploying documentation has also gotten a lot more popular in the last couple years because again any project needs ways for people to be able to edit the documentation without having to ask for permission first and without it being painful. So the way ours in particular works is we have some grunt tools that process the content and deploy it over WordPress's XML RPC into WordPress and that's for if you're developing locally or when the site is on jQuery.com or and then we also have staging environments and then we automate all those deploys using git hooks and the same grunt scripts so it's pretty rad I think but it's also a paradigm shift for what a lot of people are used to and but I also think it represents a really good opportunity to for people who have not like learned had to learn git or had to learn the command line and so on and so forth because they didn't feel like they had the facility to contribute to jQuery core or any JavaScript library where you're more of a consumer of JavaScript than you are you feel like you're ready to write the tools you're earlier on the process per se for you to learn those tools without having that other thing to figure out so it's like okay I know how to write a sentence in English that's something I'm good at or hey I know how to write a sentence I know how to write a lot of sentences in Portuguese and I'd like to translate all of the jQuery websites either way you can do commits and you can have pull requests and you can do local development and install Node.js and have a reason and have something to work on that is well within your strengths and it gives us an opportunity to to give feedback to whereas you know before if it was a change there that's a lot more impactful to make a change to a system and then have someone back it out and say sorry this isn't you know this isn't what we wanted or or this isn't this isn't fit but like in a pull request someone can make a comment say hey how about this way or maybe we can change this a little bit and so it's a lot less painful to take criticism and feedback because it's a lot better approach to do that so as far as like helping out the community it's been much more and there's a lot more opportunities like actual like collaboration I think is is is probably like the what I what I've seen you know and you know it's been because I I'm really new to the community especially compared to you guys you know it's one of the things that's been really nice is getting instant feedback from Adam or from you know from people like oh what about this or you know did you think about X, Y and Z and it doesn't feel like somebody is saying somebody's necessarily criticizing you you're welcomed into the community but you have an opportunity to like sort of get constructive feedback on your on your work and you know it just feels good I think in general speaking the way the way it works now so um yeah anyway I was thinking red yeah um so you know another thing that um that I was thinking about is is how clearly like there's a lot of advantages to um you know the the libraries and the projects for for easy you know for people uh contributing now like the ease of contribution you know there's lots of advantages but also like I think there's a lot of personal advantages for people to contribute to open source and so you know I think it'd be interesting to talk about briefly like um you know how being an open source contributor has helped helped you guys um sort of in your careers and stuff um so you know going back to the idea of giving support uh doing that can really pay off in spades just day to day uh because as you learn you know it's a way to expose yourself to a lot of problems that you wouldn't otherwise run into and then or you haven't run into yet but um this sounds like a risky thing to say but I think I'll say it uh there are probably fewer problems out there than there are like people having that a lot of things crop up over and over again so it's just a matter of time so if you've learned about how to solve a thing and long before you ever have the problem and then at your job one day you run into it and it's like oh yeah of course that's what's broken as opposed to having this horrifying you know six hour or deal of terror that you actually helped someone work through you know a year beforehand or something like that are you speaking from experience without I mean sort of you know it's it's it's in a way you know it's not necessarily even avoiding problems it's just learning new techniques that hey now I when you come to a brand new project you're like oh of course I learned about it I do it with such and such a new technology or such and such a technique because now I know that it exists whereas I didn't because I'm sort of just exposing myself to this like waterfall of constant other people's thoughts when I got into code yeah when I got into um you know coding as like a profession because my day job was totally different um back but I was always a freelancer and so getting into um getting into a community where like you're helping people you're trying to discern what their actual problem is you're working on projects together with people there's a lot of skill set that happens in learning how to how to express yourself how to understand what what the needs are of something to collaborate with people and take in people's advice and I mean there's some you know like humility lessons and they're like well okay that was like I was sure I was right and you find out that like you weren't um like I was against word press from the get go like I I did not want word press and it turned out to be the most elegant system and we ran with the help of um uh nason and uh coupe from like the Andrew and Daryl yeah yeah I feel like we should give them a shout out really quick oh yeah those guys are so freaking smart and uh and uh and cori you like you know setting up our infrastructure stuff like just watching that get so fast like watching our infrastructure gets so powerful with this um you know it's just it's amazing because you learned to like take a step back take in all of the knowledge that's around you especially about coup I mean we have so much knowledge there and so you learn a lot about like how to learn how to teach how to work together um and is like you know hippie as that might sound it's like it's really powerful and I think professionally I think as far as a career as far as personally like you just you get a lot of value from that and so there's a big investment that pays off when you get involved in that kind of community and work it seems I don't know it seems almost like devaluing it's like if you care about anything then you know uh in the way like that a lot of people end up caring about whatever open source project they work on um that obviously sort of uh transmits value and like there's a reason that people come to conferences and they're looking for they know that that's where they can find like talented people it's because they the people who are there are the people who pretty much care the most uh and are likely to have got a breath of experience from doing things like uh all the stuff that Dan was just talking about so and so forth um it's funny to note that like all that the fact that you know we had help from WordPress guys on putting the jQuery stuff together was just a process of like going to a meet-up and talking again so it's uh nice people are nice people are I was gonna say like I mean at the very least it's just been you know nice to you know step into community and like make friends you know like you guys you know so that that open source contributing open source gives me warm and fuzzy and and and that's important I mean that's important to bring up because like we I hear a lot about how open source contributing open source sucks and disagree well I mean disagree but also sometimes it ends up sucking for people and it's uh sad that it does and I I wish that like more and more people would continue to sort of just take this ethos that everyone didn't know as something wants uh because uh there's a lot of like derision and dispersions cast at people who try doing try reinventing a wheel that they didn't know or try and something new that other that another group of people have experimented with before uh and know does work or no doesn't work or no kind of works but have philosophical objections to and people are really fast to get hotheaded and judgmental and that sucks um and you know I I hope that that in as a new cover to open source it if you run into that it sucks but you can only try to try to dispel it with activity and try to imbue that into whatever place you end up settling down you kind of just have to be be an example for other people you know um I think so if you know if somebody's kind of maybe being a little intimidating to others or whatever I you know just try and support the support people coming into the community and make them feel welcome and all that sort of stuff so that's all don't visit jQuery support and I don't see because yeah jQuery is pretty cool so other than jQuery though what do you guys want to support and contribute to this year um Dan I know you've got something you're working on and um you know I was just curious at the KooFest several several bowcoopers were working on like um let's see voxel which was max octon's thing and um and you were working a little bit on bear Dan so curious what you guys want to help out with this year well um as far as libraries go um it's half like wherever there's a need and you know of of course like the multitude of jQuery things will always be there but uh yeah you know we got um our new plugin site kind of prompted me to make sure to like you know update all my plugins so I'll keep working on those um and then uh yeah I got gif and um bear which is not like quite released yet but I mean it's up on github but for um actually deploying stuff to the server using gith so that'll be a lot of work you know in other libraries too then um trying to help out more bash and um oh we lost Dan we lost Dan uh so fish um well I guess uh he'll he'll probably pop back in here in a second there he is there he is welcome back Dan um uh Adam what what do you want to contribute to this year so uh one of the things we're doing one of the new jQuery sites is the jQuery learning site which is kind of adapted from uh jQuery fundamentals which Rebecca Murphy wrote a couple years ago um and it's kind of designed to be the documentation in the middle that is not the api reference but is kind of just like here's stuff you need to know or here's problems that you need to solve so I want to it's that's a brand new site and I want to keep uh growing that out um and gosh a lot of well again there's a whole world there's a whole host of things I've had the number of irc pings I've had during this hangout is too um but uh that's that's what's um oh no Adam I think you're you're frozen too I guess I'll talk oh and now Adam's gone it's just me um well well they came back I guess I'll say but I was gonna what I want to contribute to this year is um Rick Waldron has um a really cool library you guys know about um I think he did a hangout on it earlier this year um Johnny Five which is um super cool and it's like our an Arduino uh JavaScript uh Arduino frameworks and that just sounds like a lot of fun uh to get to play with robots and JavaScript um and then of course I'd love to continue to help um oh oops I just ejected Dan I do not want to do that um I don't know how to unmute Dan sorry Dan oh Dan here I can unmute myself now yay I was like you're back um and we lost Adam so for a minute I was just me talking to myself about nice yeah you know but I was saying I want to learn uh I would like to get um involved with uh Johnny Five at some point this year um because it's I just think it sounds way fun to be uh a uh to to work with Arduino's and JavaScript at the same time that sounds like make little robots move around I would be pretty exciting and then to help um where I can uh with uh the learn site that Adam was just talking about that would be pretty rad to continue to do so that's what I want to do that's great news I think for a message like especially what you're talking about um being involved in this stuff like your your interest is so many emerging technologies I mean like Rick and all his work he's done with Johnny Five and like marrying technology or actual hardware with JavaScript um it's it's it's incredible because there's so many things that are advancing and if you're interested in keeping up with new cool stuff like being a part of these projects is really where it's at so that's awesome that you're getting into that yeah so um I'm looking forward to learning more and you know and having fun while I do it I think it's another big important part and I guess that's another reason why like um this community so much is like I feel like I have fun I feel in learning about jQuery and learning about JavaScript and learning about all of these frameworks and libraries like everybody that most everybody that I've talked to has been really cool and um it's been a lot of fun frankly it's just it's fun so um hopefully hopefully other people will agree with that see warm fuzzies warm fuzzies I guess that's it um yeah anyway well um you know we've been chatting for a while and I'm sure you guys have um you know work to do on cool projects for Voku right um but uh it's been oh adam I think you're needed I just got it okay yep I was just making I was just talking about silliness okay just saying oh my gosh I have another important meeting and project yeah yeah so um anyway I so I just wanted to say thanks for taking a few minutes today and like chatting and you know about open source stuff and also to anybody who may watch this later you know come um seek us out on Twitter or um at Voku.com because I know Adam Dan and myself are always like super excited to talk to people about this stuff um especially oh yep I've got our bomb guy there so yeah thanks for thanks for hanging out and listening to us today and um we will you know catch another time hang out again soon right yeah awesome all right guys have a good evening he's out bye