About

Joshua Poddoku at a desk holding a pen, beside a stack of books and a tablet

I’m Joshua Poddoku, an Open Source Technology Evangelist working across DevRel, go-to-market, and community governance.

Seven years of that has been on the community side: building the networks, running the events, and working out why people show up to a project and why they stop.

What I’ve built

I’m an Apache committer on an engineering intelligence project. Most of what I know about adoption gaps I learned from closing one. Doing that inside a Series A DevTool company, the community went from 100 people to more than 400, across over 100 enterprise teams, and the project from zero stars to past 3,000. Almost none of that came from announcing features. It came from putting engineers in front of other engineers, and from building a way in that a stranger could follow without being invited first.

I worked directly with the executive team and the product and engineering leads, mapping the community work onto the goals they were already chasing. Community work that only reports its own numbers is the first thing cut when a quarter goes badly. Tied to the roadmap, it’s part of how the product finds its users.

Before that, at a pre-seed startup built to work on Open Source sustainability, I ran live technical sessions with maintainers. That taught me the same thing from the other side: a project behaves differently once its users can see each other.

Outside work, I started two local Open Source meetups in India.

All seven years have been remote and asynchronous. That’s less a lifestyle than the reason I trust written, low-social-cost routes into a project over a call: I’ve been on the wrong end of the time zone for most of my career.

Now I run HuyoWorld and I’m building Clansurf: community infrastructure that connects local producers and services over LoRaWAN, so a network keeps working through blackouts, grid failures and emergencies without depending on the internet or on a gatekeeper. The first nodes are going into remote parts of Southeast Asia and East Africa, and it will be Open Source.

I co-wrote Handbook for Founders: The Power of Genuine Users, and I’m writing a book on community, evangelism and leadership.

What I’m thinking about right now (Q4 2026)

Human community value is what keeps an Open Source project alive. The volume of AI and LLM-generated code, PRs, and issues is making it harder for a person to land a first contribution, at the point when most projects can least afford to lose people.

I use AI heavily, just not at the front door. It belongs in the go-to-market and tooling work behind the scenes: contributor dashboards that show what the community is feeling, a code review that hands someone something to learn from instead of a rejection, a shorter distance between a first patch and a second one. The place where a person meets the project stays human.

As an Evangelist I now work between three parties: the AI agents producing code, the human community maintaining the project, and the business funding both. A project lasts when all three are served. Most die early because one of them was treated as the only one that counted.

Founders building a commercial business on top of an Open Source project are carrying velocity, funding, and investor expectations at the same time, and without a clear line between volunteer and commercial contribution, the community absorbs the cost of all three.

Reading a community takes patience. People arrive from different cultures, by routes that look nothing like each other, and they bring their own cognitive styles with them, ADHD and autism among them. That shapes how someone asks a question, how they take a review, and whether they come back at all. It is worth knowing before you merge a line of code or write a page of documentation.

The Contributor Ladder maps where maintainer attention pays off. Community Signals tracks how people on Bluesky and Hacker News are talking about AI-written code, updated every 12 hours.

Speaking

I speak on Open Source governance and community adoption. I’ve keynoted at GDG DevFest (IIT Raipur) and Symbiosis Pune, spoken at Microsoft Reactor and FOSS United, and served as Track Chair and a panelist at Open Source India. If you’re running an event or a community programme in this space, get in touch.

Joshua Poddoku, far right in a dark suit, on a seven-person panel at Open Source India 2022, under the conference screens at NIMHANS Convention Centre, Bengaluru

I was a featured guest on Major League Hacking’s The State of Developer Education, in conversation with MLH co-founder Jonathan Gottfried.

I’ve been on the other side of the mic too, hosting conversations and webinars with more than ten Open Source maintainers and founders, and X Spaces on these problems that drew more than 180 listeners.

Joshua speaking to a room of about twenty people around a boardroom table, with a slide behind him headed "Non Code Contributions"

Working together

I work with maintainers, and with founders embedding Open Source into a commercial business, on adoption gaps, contributor onboarding, community governance, and the volunteer/commercial divide.

That consulting is what funds everything else here. HuyoWorld and Clansurf are not businesses and are not trying to become ones, and neither is the writing. Keeping a clear line between the paid work and the volunteer work is what I tell founders to do, so I hold to it myself.

Email ask@joshuapoddoku.com, or DM me on X or Bluesky.

Support this work

Consulting covers most of it. What it does not cover is the time: the writing, the ongoing collection behind Community Signals, and the hours in community forums. If any of that is worth something to you, you can support it on Patreon.

Grounding

In the Himalayas, a man walked me to his coop, handed me warm, fresh eggs, and refused to take a single rupee. I stood there much longer than the visit required, thinking about what real local value looks like when you strip away the financial gatekeepers.

A snow-lined mountain road curving away between forested Himalayan slopes

I rode a bike through those mountains, and across ten countries I’ve kept the same deliberately small setup: physical tools I can maintain by hand, and a workspace that packs into one bag in ten minutes. Away from the screen you’ll find me working leather, making tallow shaving cream, or sourcing food straight from the farm. I can tell which eggs, chickens and vegetables are genuinely organic.

A cloth bag of unwashed brown eggs, dirt still on the shells A worn leather rucksack with brass buckles, sitting on top of a hard suitcase A safety razor in a leather sheath beside a shaving brush, a tin of tallow soap and a lather bowl

Where to find me

Every week or two I send a short, handpicked note on what's moving in Open Source, and what the community signals are showing. You can unsubscribe from any email.