.NET Foundation Campaign: Rob Prouse
Why I'm running
As the lead of an OSS project that has been with the Foundation for several years, I still don't feel like we are really a part of the Foundation. After we joined, there was very little communication and we didn't understand what help the Foundation could provide for us. I think that the future of .NET relies on a strong open source community. As such, I believe that the Foundation needs to do more to help its member projects build community. We also need to improve the onboarding documentation to show maintainers how to access the Foundations resources and provide them with best practices for running their projects.
I also think that the Foundation needs to reach out to the non-.NET community. Sponsoring .NET Meetups is fine, but many developers still don't know how incredible .NET and its ecosystem is. Many still believe it is the Windows only enterprise language of a decade ago. We can only change that by venturing outside of our own eco-chambers.
Who am I?
I first fell in love with computers and programming in high school but I didn't return to it professionally until my late twenties. I started as a Linux developer but tried C# 1.0 in 2002 and I haven't looked back.
I've been awarded as a Microsoft MVP five times, I lead the open source NUnit Test Framework development team and I contribute to numerous open source projects. I also co-lead CoderCamp Hamilton, a monthly meetup / mini-conference for the local development community.
I regularly speak at user groups and I teach coding to under-represented youth in the community to show them how to be creators instead of consumers of technology and hopefully share the passion I found at that age.
Experience with the Foundation
I lead the NUnit project which was one of the early projects to join the foundation in 2017. I've also contributed to many other .NET Foundation OSS projects.
What are my goals for the .NET Foundation?
I aim to improve the onboarding documentation and resources for our OSS projects. I will also reach out to non-.NET usergroups and conferences to make them aware of the speaker directory and pre-canned presentations that are available. Then to grow those resources, I will reach out The Microsoft MVP community to encourage more of them to join the speaker directory and contribute presentations.
The .NET foundation has started gathering and providing learning materials and courses that can be used by educators, boot camps and new developers wanting to level up their careers but we have not made much progress yet. I hope to accelerate that.