The Open-Source Contributions I Appreciate Most

Beyond features and bug fixes

I have previously written about how I unwittingly found myself at the center of an accidental community with a shared desire for a stable, reliable tiling windows manager for Windows.

The Pleasure of Accidental Communities

Despite the huge growth of komorebi users, I remain for all intents and purposes the sole developer of the codebase.

Several of the most important aspects of komorebi today however are in large part thanks to community contributions. In no particular order:

• Packaging for distribution with Scoop in GitHub Actions

• Packaging for distribution with WinGet in GitHub Actions

• Publishing and auto-updating on the scoop-extras bucket

• Publishing and auto-updating on WinGet

• Reports and fixes for “apps behaving badly” on Windows

More than anything, I believe these are the things that have truly contributed to the amazing growth and adoption of komorebi among both long-time Windows users and new Windows users coming from Linux and macOS.

@sitiom has been a major driving force behind all of these contributions and improvements to komorebi, and the ecosystem around it has grown so much more mature and robust thanks to their efforts.

I’m happy to announce that @sitiom has accepted my invitation to serve as a collaborator on the komorebi-application-specific-configuration repository and will share the responsibility of managing contributions to this centralised hub of fixes for “apps behaving badly” on Windows, hopefully providing for an ever-more seamless out-of-the-box tiling window management experience for all users (hopefully for those using other tiling window managers too!).

You may be someone who would like to contribute to komorebi (or any other project) but feels like they are lacking the capability to contribute anything meaningful. Perhaps because of the language used by the project, or even just the perceived complexity of the codebase and the problem area.

If that sounds like you, I would like to draw your attention to this excellent comment by Andreas Kling:

emptyparadise: I want to become powerful enough to contribute to SerenityOS.

akling: You are already powerful enough! Some of our most active developers today didn't even know C++ when they started. If you're interested, look for something small that annoys you, and then see if you can't figure out enough of the code to fix it. :^)

Even if you’re not ready to contribute code, I hope that this article reassures you that code is not the only way to contribute to an open-source community. Packaging, distribution, documentation and helping maintaining resources like a project wiki are invaluable contributions to any open-source project ecosystem.

Take it from an open-source maintainer who spends most of their time with their head down in the code: these are the contributions that I appreciate most.