The OpenStack community has been and needs to continue to be a welcoming community for developers in all programming languages. Naturally I’m referring to developers who are building systems on top of OpenStack and not the developers of OpenStack itself.
This email is prompted by a minor incident in the #openstack IRC channel. I’m not looking to single people out so I’ll use a pretty generic description so it can’t so easily be found in the IRC logs. A developer came to #openstack to ask a question about a software development kit (SDK) in another programming language. Within 1 minute he got a reply that can only be described as snarky. Undeterred, he went ahead and asked his questions. 20 minutes later a couple of more snarky responses were added to it. No real help at all. It’s not the lack of help that’s at issue though. It’s the unwelcoming attitude. I have not seen that developer in the channel since then. Like I said, a minor incident. I don’t want to blow this out of proportion but it does need to be addressed. It’s one of those cases where you see the cracks start to appear, it’s best to fix them right away before they become real problems. I’m sure we’ve all been part of such chats about languages. When you’re face-to-face or online but know the people personally, it usually goes without saying that it’s good natured. However, when you’re new to a community, it’s not so clear. Of course the OpenStack community is Python-centric but the OpenStack API is not. We need developers from all of the other languages building on top of OpenStack in whatever language they need to work with. Remember, it might not even be their choice! Let’s continue to be good stewards of the OpenStack API and encourage it’s use by all programming languages by being an inclusive and welcoming community. If you ever encounter someone looking for help with another language, you can always point them to the SDKs wiki page [1]. They should be able to find their way from there. Everett [1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/SDKs
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