Compassionate Coding: Safia Abdalla's Insights on Empathy in Open-Source Development

The Modern .NET Show

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Show Notes

"I think, regardless of how technology evolves, it's very important and us the most important thing is for us to be decent and understanding of each other and to be willing to like work towards a common goal."— Safia Abdalla

Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Modern .NET Show; the premier .NET podcast, focusing entirely on the knowledge, tools, and frameworks that all .NET developers should have in their toolbox. I'm your host Jamie Taylor, bringing you conversations with the brightest minds in the .NET ecosystem.

Today, we're joined by Safia Abdalla. Safia is one of the engineers at Microsoft who works on ASP .NET Core, meaning that most of her work is in the open. We talk about Safia's journey in development, what it means to work entirely in the open, and what it's like to read through and triage issues on the ASP .NET Core repo.

"I have certain people in my open source career who I have met and interacted with on a number of different projects, And the ones that stand out as great mentors and role models for me were people who were so good at creating psychological safety in open source spaces so that people could present their ideas. And they were really good at uplifting other people's ideas and pushing them further."— Safia Abdalla

We also talk about the importance of interpersonal skills in modern software engineering (whether you're working in open source or not), psychological safety, and the importance of self-reflection in our day-to-day work.

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Anyway, without further ado, let's sit back, open up a terminal, type in `dotnet new podcast` and we'll dive into the core of Modern .NET.

Full Show Notes

The full show notes, including links to some of the things we discussed and a full transcription of this episode, can be found at: https://dotnetcore.show/season-8/compassionate-coding-safia-abdallas-insights-on-empathy-in-open-source-development/

Useful Links:

• Safia on GitHub
• Safia on Bluesky
• Safia's website
• ASP .NET Core issues on Github
• Podcast editing services provided by Matthew Bliss
• Music created by Mono Memory Music, licensed to RJJ Software for use in The Modern .NET Show

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Music created by Mono Memory Music, licensed to RJJ Software for use in The Modern .NET Show.

Editing and post-production services for this episode were provided by MB Podcast Services.