I am a Ruby on Rails developer. Contact Me if you have an interesting project.Favorite Quotes:
"...it ain't about how hard ya hit. It's about how hard you can get it and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done!" (Rocky Balboa)
" We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand." (Randy Pausch)
How I (finally) contributed to open source
17-Jan-12, 01:28AM
I started using Linux in 1999 and since then had an ambition to contribute to open source. I got many chances then, but let go of them. I joined local Linux User Group and started collaborating on mailing list - helping people and most of times getting help from there. At that time, I got in touch with a Linux Documentation Project who needed volunteers to write/update documentation about various aspects/tools of Linux. But around that time I got busy with my job and could not help much.
In 2004 Rails came, I got interested and tried using it a bit. It was in probably in beta at that time. But my job at that time was mostly Project management and I was doing very little programming. Gradually my job became more distant from open source as well as programming. Around up to 2009 I was mostly doing project management and business development. At which point I decided to get back to programming and I chose Rails.
After leaving job, I started learning Ruby & Rails and instantly fell in Love. I was again programming and I was again very busy. And I again was not contributing much to Open source! So after 12 years and I still could not do it. I was seriously thinking there is something wrong with me!
And then this happened ... around 10 days back I started using MongoDB and Mongoid. The switch was not easy, and I had to read a lot of material. And (monkey) patch some of the Gems that were requiring ActiveRecord. And on one of those Gems (Mercury) , I shared my patch with the contributor (Jeremy Jackson). He though it to be a good idea. He added the option to the generator ... and voila.. I was a contributor. I would like to add that it was very generous of Jeremy to credit me with that update.
I learned a lesson here, this is how Open source works! Rails was not invented from nowhere, it was part of a project (Basecamp) and similar was the case with MongoDB. You basically do something for yourself and then you feel others can use this and you share it with others - its that simple!