Wedge

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Many people write the essay about a person, family, friend or a mentor or teacher that influenced them. While it would be wrong to say that my parents, family, friends or teachers didn’t influence me, nothing influenced me more when it comes to shaping my career choice than the open source software community.

The basic principle behind open source software is that the creator of that particular software, whether an individual or a collective, shares their entire work, ideas, implementation and designs in a manner, generally for free of cost, which can be used by others to add and build further upon it

It was a fairly average, boring spring day back in 2007 when I had the crazy idea of opening started my own website, a discussion forum where people could come together and discuss about games. Skip a few days and I had After a few days of looking, I found a free service that allowed me to create a website, with a forum et all, and everything else, using an open source software called Simple Machines Forum (SMF for short). It just seemed like a fun thing to try back then, even while thinking I would get over bored with it after a few weeks.

Boy, wasn’t was I wrong. Come 2013 and I’m still obsessing over it and others, perhaps even more since back then. The original forum that I created didn’t really last longer more than a year, but it introduced me to the community that drove the software. It That community is comprised of volunteers doing this out of sheer coding and supporting their software for fun, in their free time, and doing things as professionally as any corporate corporation would. And perhaps that was That was, perhaps, the thing that surprised me the most, I thought “Why would they spend hours doing development of a software, only to give it away when they could’ve earned be paid fordoing the same thing?”. I started contributing around, initially by answering questions. Later , and eventually I started programming (creating software), t. The process of starting and programming to learning to write code at a level where I could meaningfully contribute took a few months, but throughout along the path, I found received help in the form of from the community as well as from friends and family. It was then when only after I had released a few little minor enhancements for SMF that I realisedrealized what how strong the addiction could be, t. The feeling you get when someone appreciates your work is amazing, and I understood the sense of accomplishment of from creating something useful coupled with the need to test, improve and grow oneself that drove the current developers

The open source world isn’t all a bed of roses, people critique over youare critical of you and your software , sometime more than a fair share’sis fair. But that However those critiques also gives you the opportunity to learn, not only how to be better at creating things but also how to manage situations better. I haven’t been really a leader, but I do have collaborated over on several team projects and it’sthe process has been a roller coaster, we would get into arguments, get stuck over for days over a simple thing, but in the end we would all grow and learn a bit, and perhaps, even more importantly, contribute back a new idea and implementation to the world which, if it helps even a single person, would can be considered a success.

Today, I have contributed to even more platformsseveral packages other than SMF, and each day, I continue to challenge myself creating to try to create new things. My school friends are sometimes curious about how much of a genius I am knowing I learned how to develop softwares and all, but I try to teach them and explain that it really doesn’t take a genius, it just takes some genuine interest and passion., by telling them and also trying to actually teach them what I have learned. I can’t say I’ve totally failed, and that, in a sense, is success.