Electric

The short version

Contributed to a Rust-based cross-platform package manager. Learned the package-installation problem space and what it actually takes to keep a CLI behaving correctly on macOS, Linux, and Windows at the same time.

What I owned

Outsider contributions to the Electric CLI — bug fixes, small features, and the occasional test that I wished had existed before I hit the bug.

What was hard

Maintaining a CLI that has to behave correctly across three operating systems. The same code path reads different filesystems, resolves different symlinks, and has different shell escape rules. Edge cases compound.

What happened next

Electric continues to be maintained by the original project. My contributions are preserved in the project history.

What I took from it

Open source has a much longer feedback loop than I'd expected. Patches take weeks to land even when they're small, and that changes how you write them — you start optimizing for the reviewer, not just for yourself.