Living open
I made my first contribution to open source today and It is not as complicated as you think!
The open source movement is made by technology enthusiasts with different levels of knowledge and skills but with the same goal :
Producing code that solve real world problems and share the discoveries with the world.
Although it is true that in the programming world, from time to time, some innovations are fundamental breakthroughs, like the appearance of blockchains for example, most of the time, it is incremental little changes, that lead to the disruptive ones.
In addition to software developed and maintained by corporations (proprietary software), some softwares are developed and maintained by communities of developers. In this case, the source code of the software is accessible “open” to the general public (open source).
An open source project, is often the product of the work of an entire community. Developer A in America would start a project, meaning he/she would either write some code that solves a problem or call other developers (contributors) to help him/her solve a problem. When A is finished or as A is working on a feature, developer B from Berlin can take the code and add a new feature or improve on one of A’s existing feature. After that, or even while all of these incremental progress are being made Carl from Canada can decide to provide his skills (technical or non technical) to the project. If the project is open source, we call this : “contributing to open source”.
Git is a tool that allows developers to use version control when they write code.
GitHub is a web application that allows developers to collaborate and share their code with each other and therefore, contribute to open source.
My first contribution to open source (fcos) is a basic webpage I wrote with links and guidelines on how to use Git and GitHub. You can find it here.
Get to know the tools and come and play with us, we are all waiting for your contributions.
