Diving Into Open Source
It's 10pm, do you know where your pull requests are?
Shawn Biddle, Senior Engineer at Synacor
Who Am I?
Shit I've Made
- RanvierMUD - NodeJS based game engine
- Cranvier - C++ port of Ranvier
- Domus - NodeJS based iGoogle replacement
- LzHilight - PHP based CLI Syntax Highlighter
- A TON of Vim goodies
Open Source Contributions
Other Stuff
- Founding member of BuffaloLab - The Buffalo Hackerspace
- Co-organizer of the Buffalo PHP meetup
- Teacher and coordinator at BuffaloLab (Check their schedule for classes)
What is Open Source software in few words?
Software whose code is available to modify
Why should I contribute?
- Learn
- Give Back
- Get Better
- Make Friends
- Do Big Things
Who's making Open source software?
Ok, I'm convinced, how do I contribute?
- Code
- Documentation
- Art
- Design
- Testing
Reality of open source
- You will get mad
- You will encounter assholes
- You will get discouraged
But when you succeed...
Guilt
Picking a new project
- Your own idea
- A tool you're using
- Friend's project
- Completely random
Open sourcing existing project
Just tell people. Seriously, that's it.
Hosted options:
- Github
- Bitbucket
- Sourceforge (gross)
- Google Code (even grosserer)
Ok, ok, let's actually contribute.
Step 1: Go Here and click Edit
http://github.com/shawncplus/talks/blob/master/opensource/index.html
Ok, ok, let's actually contribute.
Step 2: Ctrl-F Contributers
Go to the second one, ya dummy
Ok, ok, let's actually contribute.
Making your change
- Add your name to the list
- Click Commit Changes
- Click Pull Request
- Describe the change you made
- Send it off!
Holy shit!
You just contributed to open source!
Questions?
Fin
