To commemorate 20 years since Doug Cutting open sourced Lucene and donated it to Apache, I want to talk about ways everyone can pitch in to ensure the long term viability of the open source project. Someone looking at replication code for the first time in 20 years, might really understand the behavior of something like master-slave. Even though we understand it today, the onus is on the contributors and maintainers to constantly add more clarity to a project. Landing such a complex PR can be tricky and usually involves multiple people. Here's how I did it, and here are a few other areas where I have been focused to improve the long-term viability of the code base.