Meet the Maintainers: @aalmiray, JReleaser #153592
Replies: 7 comments 16 replies
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Hi @aalmiray! Since JReleaser was inspired by GoReleaser -- do you chat with @caarlos0 (creator of GoReleaser) at all? Have you ever discussed your respective projects' roadmaps or shared challenges in the release automation space? I'd love to hear about any interesting cross-pollination of ideas between the two projects! |
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@abbycabs nice! I don't know how it works, but feel free to ping me at |
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Making sure @queenofcorgis sees this 😀 |
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@caarlos0 are you in the Maintainer Community? I'll be sharing more opportunities there and can definitely ping you! |
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@queenofcorgis yes, I don't follow it much, but I'm there :) |
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Cool I will ping you there and send an email 😄 thanks for your interest! |
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Hi @aalmiray, how do you approach getting new users / contributors to your project? What techniques have helped? What techniques have backfired? Any advice for a new maintainer to get others interested in using their project? Thanks! |
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There's a community event located in Switzerland where I live, https://hackergarten.net, we usually meet once or twice a month to work on Open Source projects. I usually lead contributions to JReleaser. This kind of meetups make it easier to interact with people in a face-to-face environment. However, the World is bigger than that. When an issue or a discussion topic is open I try to encourage the reporter to provide more details, sometimes they decide to work on a solution and send a patch. We're happy to receive all kinds of contributions. Lastly, we recognize all contributors and thank them for their support. |
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Hello @aalmiray! Working with automation is always pleasing and painful at the same time 😅 Considering how long you've been maintaining JReleaser and the size that project has today, what were/are the biggest problems you faced? And, when you started the project, did you ever imagined it would have this dimension today? |
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Also, I would support @caarlos0 for the next round of Meet the Maintainers! |
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Hi @Salgado2004, hehe no, I must confess despite the time I've spent producing Open Source I had no idea how the project would turn out. I'm happy to see it flourish and grow. Perhaps the most difficult aspect was setting up the various workflows for build and release using several nodes (linux, macos, windows) at the same time due to the range of artifacts produced to support multiple os/arch combinations. Being able to test most of the setup locally thanks to JReleaser itself was a relief. But now we're past that hump and the build & release process works without a hitch. I like my releases to be as exciting as watching paint dry. Boring and predictable releases are such a peace of mind I have no qualms releasing in a Friday afternoon or even on a weekend 😅 |
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Hey @aalmiray! 👋🏾 I was reading this part of the post and had a question:
For the folks that are new to the Open Source space, have some tools under their belt but wouldn't consider themselves an "actual developer", do you have any advice on how they can find a project to contribute to? It sounds like your first contribution was to a project that you were already familiar with/already using. If you could do it all again, how would you choose a project to contribute to? |
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That's right, I was familiar with Apache commons-lang because it was a dependency consumed by the project I was working at that particular point in time. My recommendation to get started with contributing to Open Source is to look for a project where you have some sort of existing relationship, typically this is a dependency or a tool that you may use in your daily work, for which there's something missing or not working as you'd expect. Most people that contribute and maintain an Open Source project do it to "scratch their own itch". There's also projects that mark their issues with a label such as "good first issue" or similar. They are a good entry point into a given project. |
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I love to see such a thorough sponsorship page 😍 https://jreleaser.org/guide/latest/sponsors.html Any advice for other projects looking to build out & promote their own avenues of project support? |
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Thank you. There are several options depending on who the target is. Corporate sponsors should have a better experience with Open Collective and Tidelift support. Individual sponsors prefer Patreon, GitHub Sponsors, Buy me a coffee, and similar. There's also thanks.dev, a website that lets consumers support projects via immediate dependencies consumed by sponsors themselves. Whichever of these options may be chosen I would highly recommend make it quite visible in docs and comms that these options exist for a given project. For instance, JReleaser's CLI and build tool plugins remind consumers that we are open for sponsorship and link to the page you posted. |
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Hey @aalmiray 🫡! Do you think contributing to open-source projects can benefit your work? |
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Absolutely. Open Source increases your chances of obtaining a better job. You get to interact with people with different perspectives, skill sets, and experience levels. Learn new tools, IDE shortcuts, be exposed to new ideas, at a faster pace that you'd regularly do. |
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Hey! 👋 How much do you think contributing to OSS have affected your career? E.g.: do you think you landed a job just because of it, or maybe didn't accept an offer that wasn't good for OSS contributors (like the ones that forbid it)? |
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Hi @caarlos0! Open Source has been instrumental to my career. Every job I've had since 2007 (6 in total) were heavily influenced by my contributions to Open Source projects, as they served as introduction letter and a demonstration of my skills. |
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Nice, that has been most of my experience as well. Thanks for the answer! :) |
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Meet today’s maintainer, @aalmiray from JReleaser! JReleaser is a release automation tool for Java and non-Java projects (Rust, Elixir, C#, etc). Its goal is to simplify creating releases and publishing artifacts to multiple package managers while providing customizable options.
Read on to learn more about them and their project. We’ll be selecting five people who ask a question in this series to win a $30 GitHub Shop voucher!
What was one of your first contributions to an open source project?
The Apache commons-lang project had an utility class that offered type conversions, but it was unable to handle char[] and byte[] which I needed at the time.
I contacted the team by filing an issue and they suggested I could contribute the code to fill in the gap. We had a few exchanges to refine the patch and when it was ready one of the contributors merged it successfully. I was quite happy with the overall experience that I decided to contribute a few more patches once I encountered other missing features.
What do you think every good issue and/or PR should include?
When filling an issue I'd like to get the following information from the reporter:
When filling a PR I'd expect to find
In order to facilitate these expectations maintainers should provide docs stating their requirements.
GitHub allows defining issue templates which makes things easier. There are also 3rd party apps & bots that can be used to verify many of these constraints and be triggered via GitHub Actions.
How did you make the decision to become a maintainer of your project, what did you consider?
JReleaser was born as a reaction to a missing tool in the Java space. I wanted to have the same capabilities offered by GoReleaser but for Java projects, however there was no such tool available. Thus I decided to write my own. JReleaser took a lot of inspiration from GoReleaser, yet early in its design I decided to make it much more flexible so that it could be used with a project regardless of its source language, and thus JReleaser may be used to release all kinds of projects.
How do you recognize when someone makes stellar contributions?
We keep a list of all contributors (https://github.com/jreleaser/jreleaser/blob/main/CONTRIBUTORS.md) using a bot called all-contributors (https://github.com/all-contributors/all-contributors). We also thank every contributor on every PR they send.
Stellar contributions are recognized in release notes, and ad-hoc posts on our social channels.
What type of contributions is your project looking for?
All kinds of contributions are welcomed to JReleaser, even small typo corrections on our documentation and codebase. We're also looking for sponsors for which we have several options listed at https://jreleaser.org/guide/latest/sponsors.html
Use the comments below to ask @aalmiray any questions, he’ll be around to answer them.
Meet our other Maintainers
Sweepstakes rules
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