After almost ten years working in web development and operations, I’ve used a ton of open source software. And now, it’s time to give back.
It’s been amazing to see how the opinion of open source has changed. Early on, it was a point of pride to say that one didn’t use third party code. It was viewed that if you did that, you didn’t know how to program.
As time went on, the industry’s perspective has shifted to the point where writing significant amounts of your own code is folly. The logic being that there are too many details that need to be accounted for to build a meaningful app. Any amount of time spent on problems that have been solved over and over again was time not spent on your product.
Nowadays, thanks mainly to Github, any problem that I’ve encountered can be (mostly) solved by a search through open Github repos. Many of these freely given solutions have been things I’ve used to build to a business. In most cases, I’ve used these solutions for free, without even thanking the author.
Now that my life is a bit different, it’s time to give back, lest karma catch up with me. My goal is to contribute to a project every week for the next year. While I have a couple good ones in mind, I’m totally open to suggestions.