We’re kicking off a new interview series with open-source contributors to learn from their stories and shape better spaces for volunteer collaboration. Our first guest is Václav, a core contributor to Waku, Red Hat and systemd.
Let’s dive in!
Q: What kind of contributor are you?
Václav: ADHD-powered. I can’t stick to one thing for long. I move where I see impact. If a new protocol launches, like Codex, I’ll drop what I’m doing and jump in. I’m a lifelong generalist. I map the big picture, bridge gaps, and then move on.
Q: What’s your origin story? When did you start hacking things?
Václav: Childhood highlight: I plugged a 3.5 W light bulb straight into a wall socket. Beautiful explosion. Glass everywhere.
When I was eight, I borrowed a blue book from the library because the cover looked cool. It was about Prolog. I typed its code into a text file, had no clue how to run it, but I was hooked.
Teenage me read a PHP manual twice on a riverside camping trip. I came home, opened a text editor, and coded the whole thing from memory. Curiosity was the only IDE I had.
Q: First contribution? What was that like?
Václav: Day one at Red Hat, my boss left for a two-week vacation. “Figure it out,” they said.
My first real contribution was a GRUB Legacy bug fix for a power-plant data-center. I patched two of three regex lines. Next morning, Starbucks and the facility had thousands of boxes stuck in boot. QA was gone in a month. I learned to never trust duplicated code…
Q: Were you supported, or left to sink or swim?
Václav: Swim. Barely. The previous maintainer answered emails three days late, usually with “Hi, I don’t know.” I skip onboarding docs anyway. If a system shatters when a newcomer pokes it, the system is wrong.
Q: What makes a good contributor experience in your book?
Václav: It must rebuild on day zero. I should be able to clone, compile, and run without yak-shaving. Otherwise I won’t send a PR. f someone hits a bug, don’t fix it for them. Guide them to fix it themselves. Context sticks when you earn it.
Trial by Fire, Reward by Cheer
Václav later joined the systemd team, famous for its “brutal but fair” reviews. Patches were shredded in public, then celebrated just as loudly when they landed. Tough feedback plus visible praise forged confidence faster than any soft-pedaling.
Q: What’s your biggest DX frustration?
Václav: StatusGo kept hitting walls in Waku. Instead of smashing the wall, they built wrappers around it. Wrappers over wrappers. The wall stayed. Developers break walls. Builders first, users next. Waku isn’t user-facing. We need builders who create apps, discover corner cases, and send patches. Then their users become the next wave of contributors. No easy rebuild, no flywheel.
Q: Do you feel recognition matters?
Václav: Immensely. At one all-hands, four presentations mentioned projects I’d touched. That felt massive. Recognition says “your work ripples.”
I prepped an advanced container talk about Docker. Five minutes in, blank faces. Only two devs had ever run Docker. It hit me: experts live in bubbles. Dev-rel must start at 101.
Q: What’s missing in today’s contributor culture?
Václav: Devs merge and move on. They rarely tweet the weird bug they squashed or the elegant hack they found. We need to normalize talking about our process.
“One shitty blog post is better than none.
Q: So what stops them from sharing?
Václav:
- They think their work isn’t valuable enough.
- They say “that’s not my job.”
- Given an hour, they’d rather code than write.
Open source culture shifts when we share puzzles, not just pull requests.
Q: If you could redesign one thing in contributor experience, what would it be?
Václav: More visibility from devs. No marketing fluff. Just “here’s the problem, here’s our fix.”
Václav’s Tiny Token of Thanks
He sketches a “Thank You Ledger”: a gas-less Status DApp where contributors send micro-tokens and notes when someone unblocks them. A public gratitude graph that costs nothing yet shapes culture.
Q: Why do you stay in this world? What drives you?
Václav: Not money. Open source feels like the right way to build. I need belonging. If I lose it, I leave, no matter how cool the work is. Contribution is curiosity, weird bugs, constant learning - and doing that with people I want to grab a beer with.
Q: What’s the most satisfying moment of your journey so far?
Václav: Recognition. And impact. When I see something I touched ripple through the ecosystem - or when people say “hey, that saved me hours.” That’s the real win.
Want more stories like this?
Stay with us and explore the emerging field of Contributor Experience Design (CX) - where the question isn’t just “Can someone use this?”
It’s: “How anyone curious can meaningfully shape it, fix it, and evolve with us?”
Do you want to be featured in our interviews? Let us know!