Meet an Open Source Contributor: Sal Kimmich

Editor’s Note: We’re celebrating February 3rd, the day the term ‘Open Source’ was first coined, as World Open Source Day here at Sonatype by recognizing our incredible maintainers and contributors, and the open source projects they support. Read all about Sal Kimmich’s journey below. 

What was the first open source contribution you ever made?

The first project I ever contributed to was Nipype in 2013, a workflow for neuroimaging with a lot of cool machine learning extensions. It’s officially the 11th biggest contributing Python contributor community in the world: brain nerds really love open source because it makes it much easier to share our scripts, our data and our findings freely. 

My first contributions were pretty basic, I just just fixed up some old Python 2.7 code to Python 3. Later I got the skill and confidence to convert some old Matlab scripts to Python so they’d be freely usable without a paid license. I was lucky enough to meet most of the maintainers of that project when I went to my first Brainhack, a global effort to bring brain scientists together for open science. That’s when I really got it: a healthy open source project is just as much about community as it is about code, and they taught me how to be a good digital citizen in open source. 

I haven’t contributed to that project in years, but even today those developers stay in touch. They’ve shown me that there are really, really good people on the other side of those pull requests, and we’re all in this together to make the world a better place. 

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What was your journey to becoming an open source maintainer? 

The first project I really engaged with as a maintainer was Chaos Tool Kit. I (Read more...)