Working with OSS maintainers without getting ghosted

Status: Outline — full guide coming soon. Get notified when it ships →

What this covers

• The right channel for each kind of question: issue, PR comment, Discord/Slack, DM
• The follow-up cadence that doesn't annoy (and the one that does)
• The 5 things never to ask a maintainer in your first interaction
• The trust-building micro-moves: triage another issue, answer in Discord, polish docs

Why this matters for Indian devs going remote

Maintainers are oversubscribed and pattern-matched on noise. A poorly framed DM from someone they don't recognize gets archived in 2 seconds. The contribute-to-hire path requires the maintainer to think of you as a colleague, not a contributor — and that's earned through small, low-cost interactions over weeks, not one big ask.

Outline

The right channel by question type

TODO — bug → issue, code question → PR comment, design discussion → RFC/Discord, hire conversation → DM.

Follow-up cadence

TODO — 5-day rule for PR follow-ups, 2-week rule for issue check-ins, never within 24 hours.

The 5 things never to ask first

TODO — "will you hire me", "can you mentor me", "review my unrelated repo", "tell me what to work on", "give me a referral".

Trust-building micro-moves

TODO — triaging stale issues, answering Discord questions, fixing typos in docs, reviewing other PRs.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Asking "any update?" 24 hours after PR submission
• DM-ing a maintainer to ask a question you could've asked in the public channel
• Demanding feedback in a tone the maintainer reads as entitlement

Templates / examples

TODO — channel-decision flowchart, follow-up DM templates with 5/14/30-day variants, and 3 example trust-building threads.

Related guides

• Contribute-to-hire: turning a merged PR into an offer
• Cold DMs: the 2-a-day system and what to actually say

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