Skip to main content
A few weeks ago, a passionate developer, Nils Gereke, wrote a new fully-featured Java SDK for LaunchDarkly. They built the CI necessary to automatically push packages to Maven. And yes, they even wrote documentation, a getting-started guide, and unit tests! In fact, since we open sourced ~3 months ago, we’ve had 10 open source developers independently ship features and bug-fixes. Most open source GitHub repositories want external contributors. But does open-sourcing your code-base guarantee developers will help you write code? We sure didn’t think so, but here the meaningful steps we took to make it easy for interested folks to contribute. Here’s what we did to make it easy for folks to get started:
  • We document everything publicly. GitHub issues became the source of truth for everything we work on internally. We started using labels like good-first-issue to identify good starter tickets and made it a habit to write thorough ticket descriptions. External contributors need more context to get started. We even create product proposals (we call these “RFC”s) publicly to get engagement from the community, and we open public GitHub discussions to get feedback from our customers.
  • We obsess over the developer experience. The LaunchDarkly observability SDKs are open source, and we’ve optimized the local development experience so the SDK and plugins are easy to add to your existing workflow. If you need to keep telemetry data within your own infrastructure before it reaches LaunchDarkly, you can self-host an OpenTelemetry Collector to pre-filter and aggregate the data; read Self-hosting an OpenTelemetry Collector to get started. Contributors can also join the LaunchDarkly Discord community to ask questions about SDK setup and share feedback on the developer experience.
  • We prioritize customer issues. Who better knows how to improve our product than the folks actively using it? We get a substantial number of ideas, enhancements, and issues reported daily, and we do our best to stay on top of them. Plus, the conversations often create an engaging platform for folks using LaunchDarkly to discuss their top features.
  • We built a supportive community. Our discord has been a great way to engage with contributors and users of the product alike. It has given open source developers a way to message our engineers with questions and quickly resolve blockers. It has also unlocked a new stream of feedback and suggestions from our customers allowing us to further improve the product.
In the end, our open source community is part of our team. By focusing on external contributors as much as we do on our internal engineering team, we see ourselves building a powerful and diverse team that can autonomously improve LaunchDarkly for all.