From Bug To PR: Turning Customer Pain Points Into Upstream Contributions

From Bug To PR: Turning Customer Pain Points Into Upstream Contributions - Brian Graf & Alex Bunday, NetApp Instaclustr Open source thrives when users become contributors. Yet many organizations struggle to bridge the gap between finding bugs and contributing fixes back to the community. At NetApp Instaclustr, we’ve refined a straightforward process that turns customer pain points into upstream contributions across projects like OpenSearch, Kafka, and Cassandra. This session demystifies the journey from bug discovery to pull request. We’ll walk through our approach: how we identify issues worth upstream attention, navigate project contribution guidelines, and work effectively with maintainers to ensure our fixes benefit the broader community. Attendees will see a real-world example from our recent contributions, following an initial discovery through code review to pull request. This session is for anyone using open source software who wants to give back to the community. Whether you’re a developer, system administrator, support engineer, or technical manager, you’ll leave with actionable steps to transform your organization from open source consumer to contributor.