My OSS Commitment
Maybe it’s more of a resolution…
During 2014, I accomplished a lot of things in my life that were goals I have had for quite sometime. Some of these were becoming a father, obtaining my undergraduate degree, and starting my career as a software engineer at a company in the education industry. 2014 was an amazing year. I would like to make 2015 even more amazing. I’ve been thinking of ways to do this because honestly, 2014 was pretty amazing. I’ve decided that the best thing that I can do is focus on a few other goals that I want to accomplish.
I’ve always wanted to be more involved in open source. I’ve always thought that it was an amazing concept. For many years I thought that open source meant free and in many senses it does. I thought that if I wanted to be active in open source, it would be impossible for me to make money to support my family. Then my eyes were opened. I can do both. It just requires many times for me to actively contribute a little on the side of my job. That being said, the work I do at my job with Instructure is open source. It’s available on the Canvas LMS repository on GitHub.
I got some extra inspiration to set a goal based around open source this year from a few sources. During 2014, I found Twitter to be a great source to keep up with what’s happening in technology. I follow John Resig, the creator of jQuery, and Kyle Simpson, author of the You Don’t Know JavaScript series. During the year, these tweets came across my feed:
I was shocked that doing this was possible. It has definitely inspired me to do something each day to contribute to the OSS community. I have ideas for things that sometimes fall off of my radar after time. I hope to be able to get some ideas out this year as I code each day.
It would be easy to just push up an easy commit each day, but I’m hoping to make each commit worthwhile. I’m not going so far as to say that I won’t refactor or make stylistic changes as a commit, but I’m planning to do much more. Likewise it would be easier to just push code to my own projects each day. I don’t want to take this approach though. I want to contribute to the community more than just by releasing my own code. I want to make a weekly contribution to another project. This contribution could be a pull request, filing an issue, or helping others with their issues. We’ll see how well it goes. I should probably start coding now to start the year off right.
