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Discussion on: How and why did you start contributing to Open Source?

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Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard • Edited

Important question because OpenSource had a very profound impact on my career.
At some point, when I was interviewing, people told me "Oh, you are the author of refreshVersions? We use it and it's pretty cool".
And I cannot empathize enough how much this changed the conversations I had with those companies.
Suddenly I was not anymore the incompetent liar until proved otherwise.

But contributing was a long time in the making.
I was interested in the philosophy of open source long before I actually started contributing heavily.
And when I started contributing, I did lots of mistake, like a cloning a repo of perfect strangers, not talking with them, doing a huge amount of work, send a PR and hope for the best.

I gave my tips on how to do things better than that here