does anyone have recommendations on connector SDLC? How do you go about contributing connectors back to the main repo and keeping branches up to date ?

Hi! Do you mean contributing to a connector you might have initially created and contributed to the Airbyte catalog?

no this is more about changes or improvements to an existing connector

Are you thinking of something in addition to making GitHub issues and then contributing PRs? That is how connector changes/updates are handled.

it's more along the lines of how to handle changes between the time we make the changes and the approval actually happens. Like right now we basically make custom connectors for every connector we use so we don't have to wait until the PR is approved and we pull our version of the connector container

We are really strict about tests passing before we can merge anything in, this keeps Airbyte working as well as it does; so unfortunately you just need to makes sure those tests pass for any PRs. Here's a great doc that gives a rundown of all the tests: https://docs.airbyte.com/connector-development/testing-connectors/source-acceptance-tests-reference Our team isn't really big, so sometimes it takes longer to approve and merge PRs. There's really no way around this development process because we are committed to having well written and tested code in our codebase.