Hi team, I wanted to share some feedback based on my recent experience contributing to ActiveMQ, in the hope that it can help improve the contributor experience going forward.
I’ve been contributing to Apache projects for nearly 20 years and am currently a committer and PMC member on several of them. ActiveMQ is a technically interesting project, which is why I was motivated to spend time contributing. Slack discussions have been responsive and helpful, which is great. On the mailing list and PR side, however, progress has been harder. Over the last two months, several emails and PRs received limited feedback, and with around 90+ open PRs (many stalled), slow feedback loops and CI instability can make it difficult for contributors to stay engaged and productive. At Apache, development discussions and decisions must happen on mailing lists. There was a reminder recently sent from the board. I want to explicitly thank Jean-Baptiste for his involvement. His reviews, merges, and willingness to answer questions made a real difference, and clearly show how impactful timely feedback can be. In other projects, I’ve seen good results with a simple principle: if a contribution doesn’t break the build and moves the project forward, merge it. The committer who merges assumes responsibility for follow-up fixes or refinements if needed. This keeps momentum, reduces PR backlog, and helps contributors improve over time. I very much want to continue contributing to ActiveMQ. I enjoy the work, I find the project valuable, and my role allows me to dedicate time to Open Source. If there are ideas, expectations, or process changes that could help improve contribution flow and feedback, I’d be very happy to participate in that discussion. Thanks, -- Jean-Louis Monteiro http://twitter.com/jlouismonteiro http://www.tomitribe.com
