Episode 178: Maintainer Month with Predrag Gruevski & Kingsley Mkpandiok

Guests Predrag Gruevski | Kingsley Mkpandiok Panelists Richard Littauer | Eriol Fox Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. This is a special podcast and one of several in this series for Maintainer Month. We’re interviewing maintainers to ask them about their experience of open source and their experience of living as maintainers. We’re super excited to have two guests with us. Our first guest is Predrag Gruevski, who’s the maintainer of two projects in the Rust ecosystem. Predrag discusses his role as a maintainer for these projects, and he shares his motivations for volunteering as a maintainer, the value of making an impact on the community, and the importance of mentorship. Our next guest is Kingsley Mkpandiok, who’s a B2B B2C UX Designer, Open Source Design Advocate, and has contributed to projects like CHAOSS Africa and OSCAfrica Festival. Kingsley shares his journey as a UX designer contributing to open source projects in Nigeria, he discusses the challenges of onboarding designers, shares his approach to creating a welcoming environment and providing opportunities for designers to contribute beyond initial tasks. Download this episode now to hear much more! Predrag: [00:00:46] Predrag discusses his role as a maintainer of two open source projects in the Rust ecosystem: cargo-semver-checks and Trustfall. [00:01:13] He explains that semantic versioning is more critical in Rust due to the language’s auto traits feature, and breaking changes in Rust can have serious consequences. [00:03:15] Predrag talks about being a volunteer and how it provides an opportunity to make a significant impact on the community while benefiting from the value proposition. [00:06:32] We hear how Predrag values helping early career individuals break into software engineering and finding competent individuals who outperform their peers. [00:08:24] How does Predrag rule out people who aren’t competent yet? He explains how he’s looking for people who are