I recently described my first documentation commit to the CouchDB project.

I didn’t stop there. That was just the first in a series of documentation updates I provided.

Of course I never set out explicitly to update the CouchDB documentation. I did this mostly as I was learning CouchDB myself, and eventually as I was building a library that uses CouchDB.

Eventually, the maintainers of CouchDB reached out to me and asked if I wanted to join the CouchDB project as a committer. This meant I would have commit access to the CouchDB-related GitHub projects. Then in 2020 they invited me to join as a member of the Project Management Committee as well.

And here’s the interesting part: All without ever writing a single line of code for CouchDB!

I don’t even know Erlang, the language in which CouchDB is developed. (Although I would enjoy learning me some Erlang, and it’s a tentative goal for 2022!)

Contributing to open source, and being recgonized for your contributions to open source, can take many forms, and may not require writing code at all.