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Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://launchdarkly-preview.mintlify.app/llms.txt

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portrait of Vadim Korolik.

by Vadim Korolik

A few weeks ago, a passionate developer, Nils Gereke, wrote [a new fully-featured Java SDK](https://github.com/highlight/highlight/pull/
  1. for LaunchDarkly. They built the CI necessary to automatically push packages to Maven. And yes, they even wrote documentation, a getting-started guide, and unit tests! In fact, since we open-sourced ~3 months ago, we’ve had 10 open-source developers independently ship features and bug-fixes.
Most open-source GitHub repositories want external contributors. But does open-sourcing your code-base guarantee developers will help you write code? We sure didn’t think so, but here the meaningful steps we took to make it easy for interested folks to contribute. Here’s what we did to make it easy for folks to get started:
  • We document everything publicly. GitHub issues became the source of truth for everything we work on internally. We started using labels like good-first-issue to identify good starter tickets and made it a habit to write thorough ticket descriptions. External contributors need more context to get started. We even create product proposals (we call these “RFC”s) publicly to get engagement from the community, and we open public GitHub discussions to get feedback from our customers.
  • We obsess over the developer experience. We’ve optimized our docker stack for the developer workflow, making sure the setup was smooth and key productivity-boosters like code hot-reloading and breakpoint debugging worked out of the box. Moreover, we’ve made self-hosting highlight a breeze by supporting different runtime environments with a pre-build cross-platform docker image. Plus open source contributors have a [dedicated channel](https://discord.com/channels/1026884757667188757/
1067576228674011136) to ask about their setup and voice opinions regarding the DX.
  • We prioritize customer issues. Who better knows how to improve our product than the folks actively using it? We get a substantial number of ideas, enhancements, and issues reported to our open source GitHub daily, and we do our best to stay on top of them. Plus, the conversations often create an engaging platform for folks using LaunchDarkly to discuss their top features.
  • We built a supportive community. Our discord has been a great way to engage with contributors and users of the product alike. It has given open-source developers a way to message our engineers with questions and quickly resolve blockers. It has also unlocked a new stream of feedback and suggestions from our customers allowing us to further improve the product.
In the end, our open-source community is part of our team. By focusing on external contributors as much as we do on our internal engineering team, we see ourselves building a powerful and diverse team that can autonomously improve LaunchDarkly for all.