Step 34: Fulfill Your Ambitions with Open Source ~ Richard Monson-Haefel
This is the 34th Step towards gaining the Programming Enlightenment series. If you didn’t learn the 33rd Step, read it.
What is Open Source?
Open-source software (OSS) is computer software with its source code made available with a license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose. Examples include Linux, MySQL, Firefox, Ubuntu etc.
Why contribute to Open Source?
Because Open Source are awesome.
Open Source project are heavily maintained by great developers in that field. Every piece of code is an opportunity to learn, how a good software is built.
When you get to contribute the code and ideas to the project — we will learn something new just by working on solutions and contributing code.
Instead of using the Open Source software for our easy, we will learn the inner workings of how the magic really happens inside.
We get an opportunity to meet great people with the same passion for the same field.
It will be an excellent opportunity to showcase and add value to the OSS which the community can thrive upon.
How to contribute to Open Source?
There is a wealth of Open Source available out there. One can start out with libraries and go deeper into other framework OSS.
RxJava — Reactive Extensions for the JVM
Kotlin — Kotlin Programming Language
Dagger 2.0— Dependency Injection for Android and Java
Retrofit — Type-safe HTTP client for Android and Java
If you want to start, you could offer to help out with the documentation.
Could start by volunteering to write test code.
Even better look at the bugs, or suggested feature enhancement, make fixes and create a pull-request for it.
TL;DR Dive into the OSS. Learn how the magic happens and if you want more start by contributing today.
Go to 33rd Step
Go to the 34th Step.
References:
- 97 things Every Programmer Should Know ~ Git Book
- 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know ~ Paperback
- Open source Software ~ Wiki
