Do you contribute to open source? Why? Why not?

Our team is planning to build some tools/services related to open source.

We think that a lot of developers want to contribute to open source, but don’t do it for various reasons. We want to gather more insights about it and try to improve it.

We made a small survey with questions about open source. Would mean a lot to us if you take part. It should take only a couple of minutes.

Link: Open survey

Thanks! Also would be nice to discuss here what you think!

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I think that open source is the way to go further and hone your own skills.

Also when you participated or open source your project, you can get a lot of code reviews opinions and new approaches for a certain problem.

Furthermore when you are beginner and have questions about how to implement a feature an open source project can make others help you better if they see the whole code in front of them not just pieces of it.

So I am most definitely an adopter of this idea.

Thanks for creating this topic

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Completed.

My main blocker to contributing in general is health issues and free time. If not for that I’d be an unstoppable machine.

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I have so many projects on the go, that I only contribute to projects that are critical for my work and that I feel like I have the ability to contribute to.

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Back in 2016 when I was in the core team of a content management system, I obviously contributed a lot. Mainly documentation but also CMS extensions and fixes for other people themes to keep them compatible with the current CMS version (yeah, one time I updated all available themes for a new major version of the CMS). Since we also used it at work, it was a great fit and I could do certain things during work hours.

After I left the team, I didn’t really contributed to OSS anymore. Mainly because I don’t know where. I hoped to find another project where I could join as a core member but no luck so far. But that is fine, I don’t really code much in my free time anymore. I have my Elixir based static site generator where I work on once a year during Hacktoberfest, that’s it.

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I didn’t contribute to open source while working with C++, .NET or Java.

As soon as I started working with Elixir I found it easy to get started forking repos, update the mix file to build from the fork and start making enhancements.

The tooling and community are just fantastic.

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