Siobhan McKeown recently authored an amazing post at Smashing Magazine about contributing to WordPress. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to share some of my own thoughts, mostly surrounding BuddyPress and bbPress.

If you’re a part of the WordPress community, this is a great read, with ideas and suggestions from a few of the most iconic WordPress contributors. I’ll leave you with my two favorite snippets from my pals Matt and Mark:

The number one skill you need for just about any job, but specifically working on open source, is communication skills. You need to have clarity, consistency, compassion, relatability, a little bit of a thick skin and a decent sense of humor. — Mark Jaquith

You can’t knock on the door at Google and say, “Hey, do you mind if I help you out with your home page? I have some ideas for you.” But you could come to us and say, “Hey, I have some ideas for your dashboard, and here are some patches.” — Matt Mullenweg