Most businesses use Open Source Software in some way, whether it’s bundled in a product they purchased or using it directly, however not many give back to those projects…

I’ve always wanted to start something open source or at least contribute to open source and this year was the pinnacle: I heard about Hacktoberfest - an initiative run by DigitalOcean and DEV getting people to submit 4 Pull Requests to Open Source, specifically on GitHub, in the month of October (a pull request is a request to accept the contribution to the code) and get a t-shirt. This gave me a reason to go beyond trying, so I signed up and started looking for issues tagged for Hacktoberfest. I looked for the low hanging fruit, but most of that was taken. I thought I’d try marry my skills to a project that required help but getting to grips with the what, why and how was not going to be time well spent - starting with something you know lowers the barrier to entry: so I narrowed it down to things I use/work on every day at the office.

ARI4Java is used as part of an integrated solution between our CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and Asterisk (telephony) systems, I had previously worked on this project and the maintainer was looking for someone to help, so I jumped in. This project was where my 1st contribution got accepted, although that was a long time ago I recall feeling good for what I had done, not just fixing the issue for us but for a wider community. I met Lenz, the author of the project, at a conference. We got chatting about maintaining an open source project. There I was thinking that you need to be a genius and have some special powers but realised that he was an ordinary person who, like me, enjoys making software. Don’t get me wrong, I still think he’s a genius with special powers but with this new outlook I will now contribute where I can like I did for Hacktoberfest. I will finally publish a project I started a while back, which started started out as a proof of concept in a personal capacity. It is now used in our over 80 people call centre who use it every day even though it’s nowhere near complete and I have doubts that it’s good enough. Hopefully others will find it useful and potentially contribute to make it better and more complete.

A challenge to myself is to be more intentional about contributing to open source beyond Hacktoberfest going forward. If I may extend this challenge to you: be more involved - you don’t have to be a programmer fixing bugs or enhancing the program, updating documentation or participating in the forums are also valuable contributions.