DEV Community

Rogier van den Berg
Rogier van den Berg

Posted on

How to explain the delight of Open Source software contributions to a non-developer?

Being happy that my contribution to the Request Logger middleware of Go’s chi router got accepted and merged 🎉 I found out that it was difficult to explain the 'coolness' of this to my non-dev colleagues.

So I explained it as follows:

At our company we use open source software components to build our own products (think of them as pre made ingredients when cooking). But when doing so sometimes you run into something that is not yet possible/existing in one of these ingredients. 🤷‍♂️

How cool is it that you then can (instead of waiting or searching for an alternative) fix it yourself (make your spice ingredient a bit spicier and with multiple colors for instance 🌶 🌈) ánd give your additions back to the community to be available to the rest of the world? 🌍

That just happened, I change a piece of logging software to fix something I ran into myself, and gave it back! 🎉 #humblebrag https://github.com/go-chi/httplog/pull/8

It’s always a great feeling improving some software you use yourself and giving it back for others to use too!

Top comments (0)