It often goes without saying, but a community is built from the contributions of its members. Everything that you or I build, write or share is another thing that helps create our space. Whether it's code, tutorials, QA testing and feedback, or just showing up in the Slack every single day to help guide your peers towards answers to their questions, your contributions are what makes this a great space.

Part of my job is to cultivate what we call the "developer experience" here at Puppet. We make dev tools to make your life easier and build improvements to the Forge to make it simpler to share modules. But developer experience isn't all about tooling. It's also about tutorials to help you pick up new concepts, and about a community of peers off whom to bounce ideas. And it's about knowing that you belong here and that your contributions are welcomed and valued.

That's the part I want to talk about today. We all know the extensive collection of excellent modules on the Forge is most of the reason why Puppet is so powerful. But behind every one of those modules is a story. And that story often includes questions answered in Slack, or tutorials from community members just like you--tutorials on topics as far-ranging as Rob Nelson showing how to update a module to use the PDK, or an explanation of Roles and Profiles from Martin and Alessandro, all the way to an esoteric guide to creating a completely new Puppet data type from RI Pienaar. Without the shared knowledge of a lot of really smart people, this community and ecosystem would not be as strong as it is today.

So I'm inviting you to share your ideas as well. Did you struggle to wrap your head around Hiera's new module data layer and are now ready to write about it and share your learnings with others? The #puppet tag on Dev.to might be just the space for you. Or maybe you're not big on writing, but you'd love to tell the story on our podcast or Twitch stream.

We have more suggestions about contributing content like white papers and blog posts on our Make Your Voice Heard page. And if your tastes run more towards code, we've also got opportunities for contributing to Puppet or our ecosystem of modules.

And if you're interested in listening to more ideas about the importance of a strong developer ecosystem, then I invite you to listen to my guest spot on the Pulling the Strings podcast.

Ben Ford is product manager of Developer Ecosystem at Puppet. 

Learn more