Announcing our new Maintainer Community Lead

Hello everyone! I am excited to be joining The Carpentries as the next Maintainer Community Lead. The previous lead, Angela Li, has left me some large shoes to fill, in building and sustaining the Maintainer community, and I hope to build on what she has already created.

I joined Software Carpentry in 2014. Since then, I have maintained lessons and have taught numerous workshops, and just finished up my Carpentries Trainer Training. I am currently a PhD Student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in the eastern United States, looking at data science education in the biomedical sciences, where my work is heavily inspired by The Carpentries.

I have a lot of first-hand experience with lesson maintenance and will be available to help answer all of the technical questions around lesson maintenance, as well as social and community aspects. I will also be the first to admit that I have been completely overwhelmed from external events in the past and fell out of my role as a Maintainer. I am sure many of our Maintainers for the more than 50 Carpentries lessons also worry about external factors taking away from their Maintainer duties and may also feel bad about letting the group down.

With this in mind, over the next year, I will help address these concerns by borrowing from what the Trainer community has done, by creating smoother influx, efflux, alumni, and returning Maintainer guidelines. This way we can accommodate people’s schedule changes and have a path for previous Maintainers and alumni to come back and maintain lessons. Hopefully there will be a nice dashboard to go along with it all.

I look forward to talking with everyone, meeting you at the Maintainer meetings, and answering any questions about our lessons!