What Open Source Actually Requires with Jay Faulkner

For our two-year anniversary, Tabatha DiDomenico turns the mic around and puts GROSS Out Podcast founder Jay Faulkner in the hot seat.

Jay is a self-taught technologist who never wanted computers as a career — and ended up shaping infrastructure that runs the world as Ironic's project lead and a decade-long OpenStack contributor. In this conversation, he's honest about how that happened, what it actually looks like from the inside, and what he'd tell anyone trying to find their footing in open source.

In this episode:

Why people skills matter more than code in open source communities

How to give feedback people can actually trust — and why toxic positivity damages projects

What maintainership really looks like versus open source leadership

The moment he walked away from a job over an ethical line he wasn't willing to cross

Why Gentoo might be the best learning environment for a young Linux developer right now

The one piece of career advice almost nobody in tech actually follows

Links and references:

Ironic Project: https://ironicbaremetal.org

OpenStack: https://www.openstack.org