Giving back to the open source community, one step at a time
One thing at a time, all things in succession. J.G. Holland
I have been excited by the open source world since 6 years. And it’s never been that easy to contribute, especially with popular social coding like github or bitucket. Now I reached a point where I feel the need to give back to the community, but on a more regular and serious basis.
Two years ago I translated missing chapters of the PHP documentation. I was an avid user of PHP at that time, and the lack of french documentation for important chapters like inheritance or serialization encouraged me to submit new translations to help the french community.
Now, as an Erlang intern at the awesome start-up 2600hz, I work on the next-gen open source telecom platform Whistle. Whistle is cool, it’s written in Erlang and open source, so check us out on github !
There are no little contributions, whether it’s to maintain a blogging activity or to participate to an open source project. Every effort is welcomed, Rome wasn’t build in a day. It’s better to take small steps at the beginning to not feel overwhelmed by the task. A good solution is to split the job in small chunks, rather than trying to do everything at once and doing nothing in the end. Who said procrastinating?
The first step is the creation of this blog. It’s a simple static blog generated by jekyll and hosted on GitHub pages. The template design is forked from Tom Preston-Werner’s blog. Speaking of Tom (co-founder of GitHub), an interesting reading on his blog is Blogging like a hacker, which is one of my main motivation to stay lean for my blogging software solution.
The second step is the translation of the famous git ready blog. This blog has been very useful to my git learning, so this is a good project to come back and help. It’s so easy to fork it and translate it thanks to GitHub, that I feel this is a good beginning and almost a no brainer so I jumped straight into it. My first pull request for the french version was sent today, I hope it will make it.
