“Chop Wood Carry Water” is metaphor for doing the hard and non-glamorous work. Open source projects can have a lot of this work. Especially those that are popular and have a community.

On the Helm project, especially on Charts, we have a lot of this work. Reinhard Nägele (a.k.a. unguiculus) is far and away the one who has done the most to chop wood and carry water.

Contributions to open source can be seen in ways beyond those measured by GitHub. To help us see those contributions the CNCF has developed DevStats.

The image below is a snapshot from the DevStats developer contributions for Helm. Reinhard Nägele, seen here by his GitHub handle of unguiculus, is in the top spot by a wide margin. He got there by chopping a lot of wood and carrying a lot of water.

Reinhard, if you’re reading this, I hope you know how much we appreciate all that you’ve done and continue to do.