Episode 141: Melissa Mendonça on being a Developer Experience Engineer for scientific OSS

Guest Melissa Mendonça Panelists Richard Littauer | Amanda Casari Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. Today, we are so excited to have a wonderful guest, Melissa Mendonça, joining us. Melissa is a Senior Developer Experience Engineer at Quansight, where she focuses more on developer experience and contributor experience. Today, we’ll hear all about Quansight and the focus for Melissa’s role as a Developer Experience Engineer. Melissa tells us about a grant they are working on with CZI that focuses on NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, and pandas, she shares several ideas on what can be done to make people feel seen and heard, and we hear her thoughts on what the future of community management and community development looks like for people entering the role of these projects. Go ahead and download this episode now to hear more! [00:01:25] Melissa tells us her background and her role at Quansight. [00:03:41] When Melissa made the decision to switch from one role to another, Amanda asks if that was her plan or if she learned that the skills that she needed to get things done changed over time. [00:06:10] We find out what the focus is for Melissa’s role as a Developer Experience Engineer and what she does on a day-to-day basis. [00:08:43] As Melissa was talking about her projects that they work on at Quansight, Amanda wonders if that’s the majority of her portfolio, or if she works across different kinds of projects. We learn about the current grant they are working on with CZI that focuses on NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, and pandas. [00:13:18] We learn about the funding model and how sustainable it is. [00:16:20] Melissa shares some great ideas on how we can put more effort into making people feel seen and heard. [00:19:26] Melissa details some things she learned with the open source projects and things she recommends for others with large established projects. [00:22:44] Amanda talks about a 2020 paper that was released in nature called “Ar