Contributing to Open Source with Cursor
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December 2025, at the Mozn office in Riyadh. Around twenty people in the room out of fifty-four registrations — a mix of software engineers and data and ML people — for three and a half hours on open source.
I want to be accurate about my role here: I hosted and introduced, and the workshop itself was delivered by Usman Siddique, a software engineer at Motive who works alongside their ML and R&D teams. He earned the room.
Usman’s argument
The path he walked through was the full one, from nothing to merged:
He also covered licensing and the ethics of contribution, which most talks on this skip, and demonstrated a real contribution he’d made with Cursor that a maintainer merged with almost no back-and-forth. That demo did more work than any slide.
The line I keep coming back to: the barrier isn’t skill, it’s expectations. People don’t contribute because they imagine the bar is a major feature. It isn’t. A docs fix counts. A failing test counts. Small contributions are how everyone starts.
The other half of the evening
This was also where we announced what Cursor Saudi would do in 2026, having spent the year proving the format worked:
- Latest Cursor features and AI tooling
- Practical workflows, not product demos
- Riyadh and Khobar, more cities if we can staff them
- Six hours of building
- Unlimited credits for participants
- Five-minute demos per team
- Run with local partners
Thanks to Mozn for hosting, DAL as community partner, and Usman for the workshop.
Mazen Alotaibi (@ma7dev)