Developer Experience is the New Open Source Contribution. Here's Why.
- Time
- 2026-08-08 13:00 ~ 13:30
- Speaker
- Eeshaan Sawant, Shriya Chauhan
- Room
- TR211
- Co-write
Abstract
Open source has never had more contributors, and yet, more and more projects struggle with adoption, onboarding, and retention. Ever wondered why?
The bottleneck isn't code quality. It's the experience. More specifically the Contributor experience. Bad READMEs, undocumented APIs, broken setup scripts, and hostile first-timer experiences kill more projects every year than any technical limitation ever will.
Developer experience is now the highest-leverage contribution you can make to open source. Yet it remains the most overlooked.
In this talk, we will prove it with evidence. We'll share concrete examples of what broke and what we fixed across API ecosystems and cloud-native infrastructure: onboarding flows that cut time-to-first-PR, documentation architectures that actually scaled, API design decisions that reduced support burden, and contributor ladder structures that turned drive-by visitors into long-term contributors and maintainers. If you care about scaling your open source project, this talk is for you.
Speaker
Eeshaan Sawant
Eeshaan is a DevRel Engineer at ONLYOFFICE and a CNCF maintainer for multiple projects, with five years deep in open source and cloud native. His job? Making technical things a little less technical – or at least, a little less painful
A seasoned speaker, he's shared stages at APIDays Australia, GNOME Summit Japan, Write the Docs Australia, UbuCon Asia, KubeCon Amsterdam and many more FOSS events across the globe.
Eeshaan loves sharing what he learns, especially around open source. His continuous contributions to the greater open source community have earned him the Dan Kohn Scholarship twice, the LiFT Scholarship, and much more.
Based in India 🇮🇳, he spends his off-hours hitting the gym and brewing good coffee. ☕️
Shriya Chauhan
Shriya is a Software Engineer at Red Hat and a Google Summer of Code 2025 contributor with AsyncAPI.
A public speaker, open-source contributor, and Women in API community champion in India, Shriya actively works towards making tech more accessible and inclusive. She enjoys exploring developer communities, speaking at events, and contributing to conversations around cloud native technologies, APIs, and modern software engineering.
Coming from the hills and navigating her journey into metropolitan tech spaces, she strongly believes in giving back to the community. Beyond engineering, she is passionate about spreading awareness about technology in villages, encouraging students to explore open source, and contributing towards community-driven initiatives that create opportunities for others.
When she’s not coding or contributing to communities, she’s usually exploring ideas, storytelling through tech, and learning something new along the way. ✨