Speaker: Alex Bulankou (FACEBOOK)

For some time now I have been working in the environment where major part of the success on my team relies on how successful we were in igniting interest of developer community both within our organization and externally. At Microsoft and I led the team that owned and maintained more than 10 GitHub repositories for Microsoft Applications Insights SDK libraries, with the most active one of them 100+ commits per week. In my current role as Engineering Manager at Facebook, I support a team that is responsible for a service that runs multiple State Based Logging pipelines.

Our contribution model relies on multiple internal teams enabling their custom metric generation scenarios, ranging from straightforward to very complex changes involving complex business logic. In both cases we would have never been able to accomplish what we did without contributions from developers, however how you go about inviting and facilitating developers makes night and day difference. From the instant your software project becomes available online for others to see, learn about and contribute, everything that you do, and how you do it, including timing, efficiency, consistency and tone of your communication, documentation is critically important, it has to be deliberate and well-thought.