23 February 2013

Loving Open Source

Pretty much every component of our system is made out of open source components I can and have changed/contributed to.
Not every one of these components has a large community behind but sometimes I'm surprised by Pull Requests and Q&A on google groups or stack overflow.
I find it invaluable having direct access to people who have implemented a library, sharing ideas, asking questions about their design.
These days sometimes it feels like I'm not growing as much as I used to, I don't learn entirely new things every day anymore. But looking back, gosh! the progress over the years has been constant and the accumulate knowledge significant. More than anything: written software still appears sound. If I go back, and I look at how certain things got implemented, even smaller things, they look simple and beautiful (not everything of course).
As a proof of that, extending and providing new services doesn't take too long. 
Iterative refactoring allows me to consolidate the good things and to get rid of the bad (copy&paste) ones.

I'd like to take a chance and thank all the contributors to these projects:
Siena Project
Objectify
Construct
Open Layers
SlickGrid
KnockoutJS
Vosao CMS
Force.com Web Service Connector
All Google's Contributions and Resources!


plus several others... 
For my contributions in my free time and at work go to:

github.com/ZiglioNZ/
github.com/sirtrack



PS Recently I've been invited to take part of a project related to my latest interest: strabismus and amblyopia.
There's no public information available for this particular project yet but it will eventually become Open Source on GitHub!