About Sarah

Talks & Appearances

Speaking about maintaining and contributing to open-source projects with a particular emphasis on documentation, community building, and non-code contributions.

YouTube playlist of talks

Conference Talks

📺 Docs as Community Building - ViteConf 2024

📺 Stop writing docs; Start helping - Frontend Nation 2024

📺 One year of Starlight: Astro’s community-built documentation theme - Astro Together 2024

📺 Making effective contributions to open-source documentation - Distribute Aid, Open Source Explorers 2024

📺 Stop writing docs; Start helping - ViteConf 2023

📺 Happy Contributors, High Standards: Pick two! Balancing quality and community in open-source documenatation - Write the Docs Australia 2022

📺 Learning in the Browser - ReactConf 2021

📺 Jamstack in the Browser (Lightning Talk) - TheJam.dev 2022

Interviews / Appearances

🎙️ Kelvin Omereshone’s Twitter Space Jan 2023: Making Documentation Developers Love (listen on YouTube) / (listen on Spotify)

🎙️ GitHub ReadME Podcast: Episode 31: Bridging code and community

📰 GitHub ReadME Project June 2023: Non-code contributions are the secret to open source success - Klint Finley

🎙️ Hanselminutes Podcast September 2023: Episode 911: Documentation as a path to Open Source

📺 ViteConf 2023: Community and Contributors Panel - Sarah Rainsberger, Brittney Postma, Anthony Fu, and Matias Capeletto, with This Dot Labs’ Tracy Lee as host, discuss how to get involved in open source and foster healthier communities.

Conference Bio

Sarah Rainsberger leads a large open-source software documentation project with several maintainers and over 1000 community contributors. She brings a background in high school mathematics education, academic counseling, and curriculum development to her current technical writing and open-source community building. In her spare time, she photographs birds.

Open-Source

I am a core maintainer and the Docs Lead for Astro, and open-source web framework. I also write and speak about managing and maintaining community-driven, open-source documentation.

Personal

In my “past life” in Toronto, I helped hundreds of students through high school & university as a private tutor, teacher, academic advisor, school administrator and guidance / university admissions counsellor. I used several stylus-based tablet PCs for taking/making digital math notes long before tablets were a thing. I was also an active volunteer in the Ontario homeschooling and alternative edudation communities: writing, advising, and speaking at conferences.

Now, from our island waterfront home in Atlantic Canada, I enjoy bird photography on our scenic boardwalk and am involved with local community choirs.

Other personal interests include a good cappuccino, a new-to-me gin, watching Toronto Blue Jays baseball on PVR delay so we can skip commercials (no spoilers!), stylus-based gadgets (#ALLtheSamsung, plus many niche devices you’ve probably never heard of), and natural disaster movies where the rogue atmospheric physicist saves the day.

My home is currently Summerside, PEI, Canada / Epekwitk (though I will always be “from Toronto”). My actual physical location could be anywhere in the world as a constant travel companion to my loving husband Joe, with whom the epic “Oshawa vs. Brampton” battle is ongoing.

Hobbies and interests

Nature Photography

Taking photos of birds and other nature subjects.

sBirb

Building birding tools to enrich my own birding experience.

Vocal music

Singing choral and a cappella music in community choirs and ensembles. Low alto.

Cloud-based development

Coding entirely in the cloud with no local dev environment. Gitpod Community Hero.