As an open-source project, Paketo Buildpacks depends on its maintainers to keep the project running day-to-day and to provide guidance to move the project forward. In a nutshell, maintainers keep the project running and produce all the software our users love.

Unfortunately, we have had a few maintainers move on from the project recently. This is a part of open-source software. People’s lives change, jobs change, interests change and they move on to other things. It happens, and it’s OK. Thank you to our departing maintainers, we’re grateful for your contributions, we’ll miss you, and we wish you the best.

What does this mean for Paketo? We’re looking for new contributors! If you’ve ever considered working on open-source software, this is a great opportunity. Paketo has a great and welcoming community and a variety of ways folks can get involved.

So how can you get involved?

1. Join a meeting and introduce yourself. The Paketo team has regular meetings scheduled for anyone who can join to chat about the project.
2. Join our Slack and strike up a conversation. Many folks are on our Slack. It’s a great place to ask questions and discuss anything related to Paketo buildpacks.
3. Post a question or answer on our discussion forum. This is another avenue for users to interact with the project, if you’re not into Slack.
4. Help with the docs or website. We use Hugo and Markdown, so there is a low barrier to get started.
5. Share your experiences. Write a blog post and show folks how to use buildpacks.
6. Send a code contribution. We have instructions for contributing here and here.
7. Help with ongoing maintenance, like the CI pipelines & deployments. There are stories on GitHub for some of the work we want to do here.

It may seem overwhelming but don’t run away just yet. Here are a few tips to get you going.

1. Start small. You don’t need to start with a massive PR. Just introduce yourself and pick something easy to get started.
2. Find an itch to scratch. Motivation helps, so pick a buildpack you’re using or find the buildpack for your favorite programming language. This is a great place to start.
3. You can contribute in a meaningful way even if you don’t have tons of time. Getting involved in the conversation, answering questions, helping with docs, and even some of the code & maintenance tasks can be done in your spare time.
4. You don’t need to be a Go expert. While Paketo does use Go to write its buildpacks, you don’t need to be a programmer to help with questions, and we use markdown for our docs so it’s simple for all to contribute. If you’re into DevOps we use GitHub Actions, and always need help there. We also love to hear from language and ecosystem experts, so feel free to share your experience using buildpacks with your favorite language.
5. Join the community and start a chat. We’re a friendly group and happy to help, mentor, or guide folks on how to get started.

That’s it! I hope the process is easy and look forward to seeing you around the community.

If you’re still on the fence, I’ll leave you with a few closing notes about the project.

• Paketo is a platform-agnostic implementation of the Cloud-Native Buildpacks specification, which is part of the Cloud-Native Computing Foundation. It’s a great way to learn more about containers and Kubernetes.
• Paketo has vendor-neutral governance through the Cloud Foundry Foundation. This provides stability for the project and a great way for everyone to collaborate in a fair way on the project.
• Paketo Buildpacks are a great way to build your skills and boost your resume. We power the productivity of tens of thousands of developers and operators daily, and Paketo Buildpacks are leveraged by many application platforms and local development tools including Hashicorp Waypoint, the Pack CLI, Spring Boot, Tilt, kpack, and more.