Contributor Stories
Hear from developers who made meaningful contributions to Kestra during the Open Source Fest
Over this period, I've had 13 pull requests merged and am currently working on a couple more! 🚀 I started contributing to Kestra about a year ago with a simple goal — to test my ability to contribute to a completely unknown open-source project. What began as an experiment soon turned into a meaningful learning journey filled with amazing people, thoughtful reviews, and real-world experience.
During the month-long WeMakeDevs Open Source Fest, I had the incredible opportunity to contribute to Kestra, an event-driven orchestration platform. I dove into real-world projects, collaborating on multiple Kestra plugins and core features. Over these weeks I implemented new tasks, triggers, and integrations, faced unexpected challenges and learnt a lot in the process. I want to share my story – the excitement, the hurdles, the community support, and why I fell even more in love with Kestra and its community.
This experience taught me that open source is not just about writing code — it's about collaboration, patience, and continuous learning. It was a proud moment to see my code reviewed and appreciated by the community.
When I signed up for WeMakeDevs Open Source Fest, I was excited about the prizes (who wouldn't be?), but what I got was so much more valuable than any gadget. I got a crash course in what makes open source tick, what makes maintainers pull their hair out, and why sometimes the smallest decisions can have the biggest consequences.
Open source is where I learned to 'fails publicly and grow confidently' It's where feedback doesn't feel like criticism, it feels like collaboration. It's where strangers help you become the kind of developer you once looked up to.
It was about learning how open source really works reading other people's code, following contribution guidelines, understanding review feedback, and collaborating asynchronously with developers around the world.
I'm glad to be part of the WeMakeDevs Open Source Fest. As a learner, I'm exploring open source and trying to learn from real projects and community work. I joined the mini side quest with Kestra, starred their repo, and shared it to support this great initiative.
My journey from making my first pull request to developing a plugin for Kestra has been truly transformative. I am grateful to the Kestra maintainers for their constant guidance and to WeMakeDevs for creating such a welcoming open-source environment. This experience has encouraged me to keep learning, building, and contributing. Open source has not only helped me grow as a developer but has also given me confidence, purpose, and a sense of belonging in the global tech community.
Looking back, each PR — whether it was in plugin-minio, plugin-solace, or storage-s3 — was more than just a code change. It was a step in understanding collaboration, patience, and how large open-source systems evolve. I started with broken builds and ended with merged PR, but more importantly, I came out with a much deeper appreciation for the open-source community.
I had never really contributed to a major open-source project before. It always felt a bit intimidating, like trying to join a conversation midway through. That all changed when I saw that WeMakeDevs was organizing an open-source fest with Kestra.
Open source turns curiosity into shared progress. Maintainers don't ask for heroics; they ask for clarity, care, and accountability. That culture raises the floor for everyone: safer code for users, cleaner contracts for contributors, and communities that value intent as much as output. For Kestra interviewers and maintainers reading this, the real story isn't the diff size — it's the judgment behind it.
I want to thank WeMakeDevs and Kestra who gave me the opportunity to contribute to Hacktoberfest.