Heute: Staffbase
Contributing to Open-Source Software at Staffbase
How we support our engineers in contributing
We don't only want our engineers to embody our values, we'd like them to demonstrate that to the world too. And one of our values is ownership. You see something that needs fixing, you do it!
Last year, we told you about how we sponsor KOBS by letting its lead developer spend part of his working hours to work on it. This time, let us describe our engineers' way of making some smaller contributions. We used to have a "you-may-contribute-here" list of eligible projects, but in the spirit of ownership and autonomy, we decided to codify a simple but effective open-source policy and let the developers decide themselves which projects to contribute to. We trust them and know they'll make the right decision. Should they ever be in doubt, we have a group who volunteered to become the Open-Source Task Force - they can help whenever there are any open questions.
So, what does a contribution look like in practice? One of our engineers saw an opportunity to make our Grafana dashboards show data more clearly: there needed to be another coloring option to group similar metrics. So, the engineer gave it some thought and did a bit of research. He found that the effort is well worth the improvement and that there is, in fact, already a ticket in Grafana. So, he went ahead and got the improvement merged into what would become Grafana 10.0.
