Maintaining an open source project sounds exciting… until you’re juggling user requests, roadmap decisions, contributor onboarding, and technical debt all at once.

In this talk, I’ll share my journey as a tech lead on Kedro, an open source Python framework for building robust data and machine learning pipelines.

Over the past six years, Kedro has grown into a mature project with 10,000+ GitHub stars and a global community of users and contributors. I’ll walk through the practical strategies and hard-earned lessons from leading the project: how we scale community contributions, evolve the architecture, and strike the right balance between innovation and long-term sustainability.

Whether you’re an engineer relying on open source tools or someone curious about what it takes to maintain one, this talk will give you a behind-the-scenes look at the technical and human side of open source leadership.