I’ve been interested in the open source world for about as long as I’ve been interested in programming, and despite wanting to ever since then, I didn’t start contributing to any projects that I use until relatively recently. I think that the main reason for this is that I was intimidated by the scale of the projects around the open source software that I used and by what I perceived as a long and complex process required to contribute to them.

I’ve seen this same feeling in friends of mine that are interested in but intimidated by open source projects, and one of my goals with this series is to extinguish that intimidation by showcasing students who are active in open source projects that they care about. I plan to feature students will range from people who are just getting started and have only one or two pull requests to people who are core maintainers for very large software projects.

Another goal of the series is simply to highlight the work done by these students. Despite its open nature, work on open source software often goes unappreciated, and I want to help shed some light on the awesome work that these people are doing.

The Interviews