Monthly Community Roundup: May 2022

tuves · June 1, 2022, 11:41am

Monthly Community Roundup

ICYMI

Our Community Managers Thoughts: community findings, cool ideas, things you should know, etc.

Have you met the newest member of our team, @Akash1134? He came in hot with key highlights from Git 2.31, including features & bug fixes and tips for reusable workflows. (More to come on that, no spoilers!) For Actions newbies (as many of us are), he shared a few resources, including a blog by @talktopri, that makes it as easy as 1-2-3.
@liligalante celebrated May’s mental health awareness month by shouting out a few community members that make this place so dang helpful and welcoming, plus, an exciting new tritanopia colorblind theme in beta! We love to see it. She also recently shared a short & sweet update, and surfaced new articles, community features, and releases, for you to dig into. For those of us with in the UK–consider it reading material for your Jubilee weekend

Want to join us? GitHub is hiring all over the world–check out our open roles!

YouTube shorts and snacks:

Bigger Bites

Feature: The spotlight this month is on Hubber, @jlord aka Jessica, or Jess as I call her. Fun fact: she was the first Hubber that I met in person in the UK, and we still frequently hang out/work together. It’s extra special to be able to share a bit about someone who I have an in-person connection with and admire so much in the open source world!

An architectural mind for open source

@jlord moved to London a year and a half ago and has lived in Boston, San Francisco, Oakland, Portland, and Brooklyn since leaving her home state of Georgia after college. She’s from a town called Warner Robins and no other city in the world is called that! It’s in the center of Georgia, 2 hours north of Florida and 2 hours south of Atlanta.

She is the Product Manager for GitHub Sponsors, GitHub’s tool for funding open source projects and maintainers. She taught herself to code when she was 15 and spent a lot of time building websites for fun, but was determined it wouldn’t lead to a career path. Fast-forward a few years later, Jess got a degree in architecture and worked as an urban designer for the City of Boston. There, she was often frustrated that no one wanted to talk more about how to code to make cities better! So she did a fellowship called Code for America to geek out for a year and build open source tools for cities. But she didn’t stop there, she then landed a job at GitHub after, and became really active in open source and Node.js. She liked how fast things happened in tech and how the open source community wanted to share knowledge, which is what she’d been pushing for in Boston. So @jlord kept at it. After a few years, she left GitHub, was an engineer and engineering manager elsewhere, before returning to GitHub to lead Sponsors. Full circle! Open source sustainability has been an issue for 20+ years, billion dollar companies are using code for free and expecting it to be maintained. @jlord believes GitHub is in the very best position to really finally change this dynamic and make careers in open source possible for more people.

Her architecture and urban design background makes me her a great product manager because she’s always thinking about how people understand and experience the systems they’re in. In her work, she constantly thinks about the end user; how something is really going to feel to use, and how to build things in modular and adaptable ways. Like cities!

But her passion for cities doesn’t stop there–living in London, she has an expanse to explore. In her spare time, @jlord loves to walk. London is a great place to walk for miles and miles and she does just that. She loves to ride trains and nerd out on British history. Sometimes she’ll go mudlarking: searching for treasures washed up by the Thames at low tide, which is muddy but relaxing (and fun!). She’s also learning about gardening and British birds and is realizing how extremely cool she looks doing so. She also enjoys cool, fun things, like pubs, movies, and music.

mudlarking for treasures

Hot Off the (Product) Press

Thank you for reading our May Monthly Roundup! A special thank you to @jlord for sharing her story with us. If you’d like to be featured or have any ideas on how we can improve, please let us know below.

tuves · June 1, 2022, 11:41am