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Balancing open-source involvement and your day job
Some of us developers are gifted with the opportunity to work on projects that they can proudly dedicate most of their time to… the rest of us have to find spare time to work on open-source projects to be able to participate in meaningful projects.
I’d really love to be more active in the Textpattern community and the development of TxP but I just don’t usually find enough to time to dedicate to the effort. How do you guys deal with the dilemma?
Last edited by dreamstormer (2006-07-18 09:55:04)
“The neighboring marshmallow factory fared no better, having been unable to absorb the incredible pressure wave.”
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Re: Balancing open-source involvement and your day job
I’m not sure what advice to offer.
I write plugins that other people might use. I wrote my first plugin because I needed it to build a client’s site.
Maybe tying your contributions in with your client work (or vice versa).
That doesn’t necessarily mean that textpattern is the thing you contribute to, though…..I should say.
What OS software do you use during the day that you could contribute back to?
(I want to start contributing to cake)
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Re: Balancing open-source involvement and your day job
How to have the time to be an Open Source developer:
- Get a steady girl or boy friend, marrying or partnering is even better. This affords you more time at home, no having to drive to and fro, going out to dinner or waking up away from your setup.
- Limit TV viewing, after dinner retire to the computer room instead of wasting the batteries on the remote because there’s nothing on anyway.
- Run Linux on a spare computer or dual boot, this teaches how to find answers to your questions, be more self reliant and exposes you to the world of Open Source.
Then it becomes a case of where to contribute, where you feel at home.
We Love TXP . TXP Themes . TXP Tags . TXP Planet . TXP Make
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Re: Balancing open-source involvement and your day job
Well, let’s just make it clear that I’m not on some mission to fix the “dilemma”. I’m not necessarily looking for advice. I just wanted to open the floor to know how people do their thing. :-)
Walker: I’ve also made a few plugins just because a client needed it. It has provided me with my first few actual contributions to open-source projects. It was pretty exciting. Hehe. I really got the feel of the importance of OSS from that…
And yeah, while the TxP community is primarily what I’d like to contribute to, if I knew I had the time, I’d take the time to look into the other OS software that I use and try to contribute to those too… but I’d really rather stick to my thing – PHP and the web – and focus whatever extra time I can find to just one project at a time. ;-)
Last edited by dreamstormer (2006-07-19 04:32:44)
“The neighboring marshmallow factory fared no better, having been unable to absorb the incredible pressure wave.”
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