“What is Opensource?“.
That’s a question I asked myself 6 years back and I keep on learning about it. Short and to the point: Opensource by definition is the concept of having the source code (in software) open and available. For developers and software engineers this allows collaboration leveraging the immense talent globally and by extension having the best at the disposal of all.
You must have heard of Linux. This is by far the epitome of Opensource. The contributors of this opensource family of operating systems are so many such that Github lists them as infinity. (yeah seriously 😁 )
This may be beneficial for startups since the overhead of writing software is lower. There are a bunch of starter-packs and even fully fledged frameworks like Bootstrap. You’ve heard of Wordpress. Well most bloggers have. It’s software running 29% of the internet. However, tech giants as well, get the benefit of Opensource: Google, Microsoft, the list is endless. I’ll get to case studies of how it makes business sense in later article(s).
Contribution
I consider myself an early adopter of tech, so much so that I am a Beta tester of a number of apps and projects (living on the edge, Ay? 😉) My main driver (editor-wise) is Visual Studio Code, the insiders’ build. They ship changes almost everyday and they warn you that there may be occasional crashes. I however get to have the latest features and also give back to the opensource community around it by reporting bugs (I seldom have this opportunity. Yes they are that good)
Lifebuoy VSCode extension/package
One year ago, I asked myself, why not do more. A light-bulb moment soon became a VS Code package by the name: Lifebuoy. There isn’t much going on there as I would like (psst, contributions are welcome.)
Hacktoberfest
Every year, Opensource is celebrated by Github for a whole month. It’s called Hacktoberfest happening every October. If you raise 4+ PRs (Pull Requests) you stand to get one limited edition T-shirt. I missed it in 2016 by one PR, bummer.
Last year, 2017, I did 6 PRs. I’m eagerly waiting for my tshirt 🙂.
VueDjango
There is one project that has been received well enough to write about: Vue-Django. I’ll be posting a deep-dive into how that came to be.