Me & Open Source - a New Year's Resolution

I am working as a software developer full-time for several years now. I've already written many thousands of lines of code, but nearly none of it is publicly available. Most of it remains a property of my employers for who the code was created, but there are always some pieces that are already open source or side projects that don't need to adhere to strict ownership rules and can be generalized enough to be shared with others.

I always wanted to share and I had hundreds of ideas for full-size projects that I could do when there's enough time. But in the reality, there was never enough time and motivation for anything big. Full-time job takes a lot of time, the rest goes to family and other duties. But there is always a few late evening hours each week that can be saved.

All the things I've shared with the community up to date were mentioned here on my blog. These were mostly short gists or snippets. The only larger thing was an HTML building API based on the "loquacious" interface idea, published on GitHub as NOtherHtml. I still love the design! But I admit, it was rather one-timer, not a major contribution to the open source world.

So, here is my New Year's Resolution for 2014: try spending those few late evening hours on contributing to the open source projects. Yeah, I know no one cares, but I'm sharing it as posting it publicily will motivate me more than leaving it just as my internal thought. There will be probably no biggies for the reasons mentioned, I think I'll rather focus on bug fixes or small features for the projects I use. It's easiest, it's beneficial, it's fair.

As a start, yesterday I've submitted my first pull request to the "real" open source project I use - JP. Boodhoo's developwithpassion.specifications. I've fixed a bug in the extension method that helps assert collections elements equality, but failed when the collections were of different lengths. I feel I'm already over the hump!