Sarah Rainsberger

Sarah photographs birds, watches baseball, sings in choirs, and writes docs!

Hobbies and interests

Nature Photography

Taking photos of birds and other nature subjects. Photostream on Flickr.

sBirb

Using and building birding tools to enrich my own birding experience.

Vocal music

Singing choral and a cappella music while managing choir tech in community choirs and ensembles. High tech. Low alto.

Cloud-based development

Coding entirely in the cloud with no local dev environment on a Chromebook and Android tablet.

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.

Talks & Appearances

Talks and conversations about contributions to open-source projects beyond code: docs, community building, and docs as community building.

YouTube playlist of talks

Conference Talks

📺 Making Meaningful Open-Source Contributions - Viteconf 2025

📺 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 documentation - Write the Docs Australia 2022

📺 Learning in the Browser - ReactConf 2021

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

Interviews / Appearances

📺 Scrimba Town Hall: Chat with Sarah Rainsberger: From Scrimba student to Astro core maintainer

🎙️ SustainOSS Podcast: Episode 272: Maintainer Month 2025 with Sarah Rainsberger of Astro

📺 GitHub Open Source Friday 2025: Astro Docs

🎙️ 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.

Open Source

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

Astro Origin Story

I am a former math teacher/tutor who started to learned to code in 2018 because I inherited a crappy website I volunteered to maintain for my community choir and (only) knew enough HTML to be dangerous.

Learning web dev

I started taking online HTML, CSS then eventually JavaScript and React courses through Scrimba. After I had taken all their “boot camp” courses, I was ready to convert my personal Jekyll blog to a JavaScript framework where I could actually build from the ground up and understand every file in my repo.

Choosing a tech stack

That’s when I discovered Astro, which was very (very!) new and I had to make a choice: go with Gatsby which had a big community and tons of resources (since I was very new to web dev/Jamstack in general), or this new thing that no one had ever heard of but people were just starting to talk about which had a very small documentation site but an active, friendly, welcoming Discord. I figured Gatsby was the safer bet, but the Astro community won me over.

Getting involved in the community

Being one of the first people to use Astro, and being there as even some of the earliest features were being actively developed, I may not have known very much about software development, but I knew a lot about how Astro worked. I found that as new, even very experienced devs came into the Discord asking for help with their projects, I was able to help them because of my familiarity with Astro.

I spent hours every day in support threads, and testing out every feature and providing feedback. Although I was much more involved in how Astro worked (and sharing that knowledge with our community) rather than how it was built, eventually I became familiar enough with some aspects of the project code that I could contribute small fixes or improvements directly.

Becoming a maintainer

I was invited to be a maintainer of the project because of my (mostly “non-code”) contributions, and eventually was asked to first contribute as a technical writer (Who’s using their English degree now, eh?!) and then eventually came to lead the entire documentation project… which is itself an Astro (Starlight) website.

I’m now a core maintainer with significant responsibilities in several aspects of maintaining this open source project, which in fact requires a LOT more than code to function! I am one of two Astro Team Leads, leading Team DX which is responsible for documentation, our public-facing websites, community, support, as well as some sustainability projects.

Championing contributions beyond code

I share these experiences about writing and maintaining documentation, contributions to open-source beyond code, community building and.. all three: using documentation as community building for your open-source project!

In fact, many of Astro’s contributors and maintainers were first onboarded as docs contributors, including translators! Their familiarity with Astro through careful docs contributions (and, translators have to understand what you’ve written backwards and forwards to be able to express it in another language!) often gave them confidence to then begin making code contributions, because they understood how Astro worked. Astro Docs is a great place to contribute, even if it’s your very first contribution to open source, and this is an initiative I have championed in my capacity as a community leader.

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.