Wednesday, September 23rd, 2026
It's been about 5 months now since Zoneless launched and I made the codebase public on GitHub.
Despite being "open-source", I was the only one contributing to the repository and adding features, making changes etc.
This was a bit counter-intuitive, because I was missing out on one of the main benefits of an open-source company: other people helping out and adding code too.
This was entirely my fault, I had no system in place for this, never added any tasks, and (selfishly) liked being in control - which maybe for the start of a project is not a bad thing.
This week that all changed though. After a few requests in discord from people asking to help, I decided to experiment and write some official contributing guides.
Then I threw up a few easy tasks that had been kicking around on my Notion for a few weeks.
Surprisingly, people started picking them up and acutally doing them!
I don't know why, but this surprised and excited me quite a lot. 3 randomers have now done 8 merged commits!
So far they are low stakes things like missing docs, SDK endpoints, and an export to CSV button - it takes some time to review, and I could probably let an AI do it, but I like the idea of a community built payments platform where people have ownership over building it.
Next I want to figure out how to build bigger features in this way, or even better, have people suggest and add features without me.
