This post was orginially posted on CocoaGems blog written by me.


Before even having much experience with development it seemed to me that getting started with Open Source development is something that even experienced developer are slightly intimidated by. Therefore I want to share a story of feeling extremely welcomed by the CocoaPods community.

The background of this story is Karla Sandoval and I deciding to apply to do a program we had been introduced to called Rails Girls Summer of Code (RGSoC). We had a look at the project proposals for this year and the project that first caught our attention was CocoaPods. It sounded like a really cool project for iOS and Mac development and also seemed to be a pretty established tool with a lot of users. However, we thought that it might be to difficult for us given our limited developer experience. Since life is short and all, we gave the application a shot anyhow.

By that time we had both decided to transfer our careers into development. We had considered doing a developer bootcamp, but thought that working on a real project while learning to code was a much better option. However, we were offered a chance to study at a boot camp-like school called Tradecraft that had just started an engineering track with mobile and web development in their curriculum. Tradecraft was a great way for us to get started on learning iOS development, and to get a better understanding of how CocoaPods is used. After about three weeks into the boot camp, we got accepted for RGSoC and started to prepare for the CocoaPods project.

The timing of RGSoC couldn’t have been more on our side. After yet a couple of weeks in on our boot camp and a couple of weeks before the RGSoC project would start, the yearly WWDC week took off. WWDC is Apple’s annual developer conference where the new Mac and iOS releases are revealed. The conference is important and very popular in the iOS community. The tickets are sold out in a couple of hours, and are sold via a lottery. This means that only a small percentage of the people willing to pay $1599 USD for the week get a ticket. We didn’t have tickets for WWDC so instead we and all the others without tickets were fortunate to attend the alternative iOS conference across the street from Moscone center where WWDC is held.

In the grand Metreon movie theater there would be AltConf. On the first day of WWDC they streamed the Keynote and the Developer’s State of the Union in one of the movie theaters. The atmosphere was great, it was a lot of fun watching the Keynote and State of the Union with hundreds of other excited developers cheering for the reveals. One of the biggest cheering happened when they revealed that Swift 2.0 is going to be open sourced.

During the rest of the week we hung out at AltConf, went to sessions about iOS development, Swift, Open Source and more. Our mentors from CocoaPods all spoke at AltConf. We got to hear about what CocoaPods had meant for them. About being nice in open source development (and on the internet in general). We got to learn a lot about swift and functional programming. CocoaPods also had their own state of the union event where they present the work that has been done during the year.

CocoaPods is a distributed team of around 15 developers working on and off around the world. We were lucky to meet so many of the CocoaPods members during this week when so many of them were in town. Two of our mentors, Kyle Fuller and Samuel Giddins are based in San Francisco at the time and the other, Orta Therox, is based in New York and Manchester. For a week we hung out at the conference, went to dinner, and played video games with our mentors and the other members of CocoaPods who were in town. It was great to hang out and get to know each other and get to know the work everyone does for CocoaPods.

One of the core members of CocoaPods based in Berlin is Boris Bügling. The week after WWDC we spent a great deal of time with Boris visiting startups like Venmo, Twitter, Slack and Realm. Together we started working on our very first plugin for CocoaPods with Boris’ help. It was a great way to dive into the code base of CocoaPods and be productive at the same time. I was amazed by the time and patience Boris showed us guiding us through our first steps into CocoaPods development. However, according to Boris, spending time on getting new members started pays off in the long run since the project will have more members who will be able to contribute.

Being welcoming and helping people get started are the reasons on top of my head why CocoaPods is so fun to be a part of and maybe those are also the ingredients behind CocoaPods success.