Get to know the people making Backstage ✨! To celebrate the second birthday of backstage.io, we spend some time talking with a few of our contributors and maintainers, to learn why they started contributing to Backstage, what they've contributed and why they think Backstage is a good project to get involved with.
Meet Irma Solakovic, She's a software developer working at Roadie.
Can you tell a bit about yourself?
I'm Irma and I come from Sarajevo. I've been working as a software developer for around five or six years and my journey with Backstage started a year ago when I joined an awesome company called Roadie, which works on hosted solutions based on Backstage.
Why did you start contributing?
My first contributions were a part of the natural flow when I joined the company. I was contributing firstly on some of the plugins that Roadie has developed.
Taking in mind that we have 13 open source plugins, that gives you a bit of an idea how important the open source community is to all of us, and how passionate we are about Backstage.
Eventually I started using backstage and realized how amazing it was, so I wanted to be part of a joint flow of developers around the world who were making their contributions, and collaborating into making a product which is something we all love and use.
What contributions did you work on?
My contributions firstly were throughout Roadie. Backstage began when I worked on some of the decisions we made. I was maintaining and helping the team out, and then of course doing some upstream contributions as UI front-end fixes.
Recently I've worked on the tech insights plugin. This plugin is something that we've all been very excited about, so we decided to divide the work among us. I got to work on the front-end part of the plugins which works on top of what my co-workers at Roadie also built, so that is something that i'm extremely proud of!
Where else in the world would you get a chance to be part of big decisions. Have that many people look at your code, hear you out, and help you out.
Why should people look into the Backstage project?
Because why not! There is literally no reason for people not to join. I know it might be a bit frightening for people, especially those who are not used to the open source community and how that will work.
It might be a bit frightening when you think about a bunch of people looking at your code and giving you comments and discussing it, or being part of big discussions and decisions.
But when you think about it: Where else in the world would you get a chance to be part of big decisions. Have that many people look at your code, hear you out, and help you out.
And on top of that I also have to mention: When you just look at the numbers, the Backstage repository has over 2000 forks at the moment and there is already over 500 contributors.
Keeping that in mind and remembering one of the statistics I read at the end of 2021, our CEO David shared an interesting statistic where he highlighted that the number of unique GitHub users which contributed to Backstage was almost one thousand.
That kind of gives you impression how important this open source community is, because half of the all the PR's merged were from upstream contributors. So that's something that gives me a feeling that backstage is definitely here to stay. And who wouldn't like to be part of that?
If Irma excited you about contributing to Open Source, and Backstage in particular, you can:
- Learn more about Backstage 🙌🏻 at the project website
- Dive straight in the repo 🤿 at GitHub
Watch the full video on YouTube: 
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