I’m a big fan of open source software, my job would be totally different if it wouldn’t exist. So I am really super excited because my boss granted me 4 hours a week to work on any OS project I find interesting. The plan here is for me to learn some team work and to give back to the community that has given us so much.
Yesterday was the first day of my endeavor. And it didn’t went exactly as I’ve planned or thought it would go. My plan was to head to GitHub pick a PHP project (because I know it the most) then pick some open ticket, do some coding, commit & do a pull request. Well the first and second part turned out to be a bigger problem than I thought. I just couldn’t find any suitable project to get my feet wet, and when I did there ware no simple tasks for me to tacke with. In the end this pull request is the only thing I have to show for. And it’s a bloody documentation addition, no code …
I’m probably approaching this the wrong way, I should probably try to get involved with projects I’m using (PHP, jQuery, Sphinx, …). But I don’t feel like I’ve got the skills to make any meaningful contribution there. Until next friday, when I’ll be diving in to the world of open source again, I’ll search for projects that would be suitable so when friday comes I’ll just start coding and hopefully crunch out some useful commits.
So this is the sort term plan; work on small PHP/JavaScript projects to familiarize myself with how all this things work from the management side of things and then, once I’m comfortable, move on to projects made in other technologies (Python, node.js, Ruby, …). That will give me a bigger pool of projects to choose from and I’ll finally start to learn something other than PHP again.
