Thursday, August 18, 2016

Open Source Community

Open source projects can be extremely overwhelming, especially to developers with no or only limited experience within the open source world. Thus, I believe that the Google Summer of Code program does a great job in introducing newcomers to this ideology by taking over the role of an initiator constantly pushing to achieve great results. Apart from initial familiarization with a potentially unknown project, students, such as myself, find themselves being introduced by their mentors to this unknown, entirely different philosophy of developing code. By overcoming initial obstacles, such as getting one's bearings by finding the red thread within the immense amount of emails in development mailing lists, conquering git (and yes, I am not talking about the daily push/pull business) considering the heavily influx code base, and getting over the fact that the underlying interfaces defining your code can change any minute, you will eventually find yourself getting along with a large, highly innovative community advancing the project in various directions. Admittedly, getting involved in open source is a lot of work. However, it is really worth the effort to be part of this community as we all know what we get from the open source world. In retrospect, I can report that it was a great experience getting deeply involved into one of the biggest open source project.