What a Healthy Relationship with Open Source Looks Like ft. GitLab's John Coghlan

**John Coghlan** (0:00)
That would be like my message to people is like, if you feel hesitant to participate because you don't want to add complexity to the project, or you're afraid that you're just going to be like a drive-by contributor, like don't prevent yourself from taking that first step. I think the most important part to becoming a contributor in an open source community is taking that first step.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:19)
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**Dan Lines** (1:00)
Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today I'm joined by John Coghlan, leader of Gitlab's developer evangelism team.
John, welcome to the show.

**John Coghlan** (1:13)
Thanks, Dan. Really nice to be here with you today. Super excited to get the invite.

**Dan Lines** (1:19)
Yeah, awesome to have you on here. A little interesting fact about you before you joined the whole developer world, you started out as a trader on Wall Street, but you quit because I guess you were miserable. Tell me about what was that like for you.

**John Coghlan** (1:37)
So I worked at a company called Lima Brothers, which you might have heard of, and I was there from 2005 through 2008, which is when the kind of financial markets melted down and sent us into the Great Recession.
But it wasn't really even the financial meltdown that helped me decide that I needed to switch careers. It was really just a culture and I felt like I wanted to be in a place where there was an industry that was growing, people were supportive of each other, and a healthier work-life balance. Around that time, tech was really starting to take on. This was just after the iPhone, and so mobile was bringing tech to people's pockets. It was just a really interesting and appealing place to be. And so I started a series of moves that eventually would help me get a foothold in that industry.

**Dan Lines** (2:30)
Yeah, that's actually super interesting. And of course, I think we know a lot of people that worked in financial-related things, maybe lost their soul or weren't so happy doing things that just drive a ton of money. But that's a really big difference from developer world. What were the series of things that you did?
Because obviously you have a really cool job now. Like how did you actually do that transition?

**John Coghlan** (2:57)
Yeah, so after leaving Wall Street, I joined AmeriCorps, which is like a national service organization. I did a year of volunteer service with them. And then I worked as a volunteer program manager at United Way. And that was like my first kind of step in building community. And then from there, I went into entrepreneurship. I started one of the first co-working spaces in Brooklyn. While I was running that co-working space, I had a conversation with a person. And they asked me like, what was my kind of mission in life? And we're standing in the co-working space was on the water in Brooklyn. We're standing like between a hat bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge, really scenic spot. I'll never forget. I was like, what I really want to do is like help people find community and happiness at work.
And I think that was something that had been lacking for me kind of in the early part of my career. And I really didn't want other people to go through that same struggle that I had. And since then, that's really been the mission that's driven me. And so that was a core kind of mission of the co-working space that we were running, like creating this really welcoming and inclusive community for people who were going through the same kind of sort of growing things and entrepreneurship things. And then when that kind of opportunity wound down, I was looking for something else similar. And so I got into evangelism, working at a couple of e-commerce companies.
And there my mission was create a great engineering culture and create a way to promote that culture into the tech community to help with recruiting and retention and people being happy at work.