Today was the first time since starting this Open Collective last year that we paid out some of our balance to a contributor.

Alys Brooks has been hard at work for several months already helping to improve the Lambda Island Open Source projects, notably Kaocha. Her latest work has been to make sure Kaocha's `--watch` mode can honor your project's `.gitignore` files, a feature that has been requested since the early days of Kaocha.

She also wrote a blog post to help new contributors find their way and get up to speed. If you're interested in helping to improve these tools for yourself and others in the community, then do check out the post!

Thanks a lot Alys!