Amit has written from India asking how to start participating in open source projects. I am a software developer from India and recently came through your article on "How improved hardware changed programming". It was good reading it. I wanted to know more about open source projects & how to get involved in it. I read that you contribute to a couple of them so thought of asking you about your experience and how did it help from a developer's perspective. My experience with code contributions to open source projects is mainly in the field of Php libraries and frameworks. This is not a coincidence as I am more stimulated to make contributions to projects I personally use: if I had to give one advice to choosing an open source project to participate in, I would recommend selecting a project you actually use at the Api level (interfacing with their source code or with their binary interface with your own code).
It's not an egoistic choice, although you would clearly benefit from your improved knowledge of the project internals, bugs that have been fixed and new features that have been introduced thanks to your work. It's more a synergistic approach.
Employing an open source project at the user level (in the case of standard applications) gives you a picture of its overall features and maybe an involvement with the supporting community, which is not a deep vision of the project goals and inner workings. But your contribution will be by far more valuable and simple if you start with contributions to codebases you already know "intimately". I would never try to contribute to Pidgin with code, because even if I run it all the time for instant messagging, the time I would spend in a field not related to my work it's probably not worth very much, as there is a steep learning curve and the learning process is limited to a field I'm not interested into (and thus am likely not to enjoy.) Read more: Invisible to the eye
It's not an egoistic choice, although you would clearly benefit from your improved knowledge of the project internals, bugs that have been fixed and new features that have been introduced thanks to your work. It's more a synergistic approach.
Employing an open source project at the user level (in the case of standard applications) gives you a picture of its overall features and maybe an involvement with the supporting community, which is not a deep vision of the project goals and inner workings. But your contribution will be by far more valuable and simple if you start with contributions to codebases you already know "intimately". I would never try to contribute to Pidgin with code, because even if I run it all the time for instant messagging, the time I would spend in a field not related to my work it's probably not worth very much, as there is a steep learning curve and the learning process is limited to a field I'm not interested into (and thus am likely not to enjoy.) Read more: Invisible to the eye
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