Dan K. SnelsonA five-question self-assessment to help you plan your 2026 Mac Admin open source contributions
Self-assessment
Your Mac Admin Open Source Journey
An anonymous self-assessment to guide your 2026 open-source contributions.
Rank
Take the above self-assessment to determine your rank from Beneficiary to Jedi-Ninja Maintainer.
Beneficiary
You’re benefiting from open source every day … great time to begin giving back.
Explorer
You’re discovering the ecosystem and starting to find your footing.
Emerging Contributor
You’ve taken meaningful steps — you’re ready for intentional contribution.
Active Contributor
You consistently help improve tools the community relies on.
Jedi-Ninja Maintainer
You’re a force-multiplier; thank you for all you do.
Invitation
I find myself hungering and thirsting for just a word of appreciation or of honest evaluation from my superiors and my peers.
I want no praise; I want no flattery; I am seeking only to know if what I gave was acceptable.
— Spencer W. Kimball
Please accept my personal invitation to increase — or, for you Jedi-Ninjas, to maintain — your contributions to the Mac Admin community’s various open-source projects during 2026 (and special thanks to Tony Young for his related post.)
Where do I start?
Start where you are. If you’ve benefited from open source projects and don’t know how to contribute, remember that feedback — any feedback — is a gift.
If you can read and follow directions, you can help. While the preferred time to provide feedback is during beta- and preview-cycles, feedback is welcome at any time; especially if you can reproduce unexpected behavior on-demand (and can document the steps to reproduce the issue).
Your next step
The fact that you’re reading this sentence is a great indication that you’re ready to take the next step, whatever it may be.
See Microsoft’s Contribute to an open-source project on GitHub.
From all of us who maintain open source Mac Admin projects, we can’t wait to see where your journey will take you.
