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I encourage you to get into (burnout free) open source

04/28/2021 , 2m, 53s

Hey friends so I wanted to talk a little bit about open source. I have been doing open source for almost as long as I've been doing software development. And it has been just an enormous benefit to me. I I can't tell you how how much I've learned and how much of what I know I learned through open source and so I strongly advise people to get into open source for various reasons.

In particular, like it makes you a better software developer, you write higher quality software, you can reuse the software that you create.In a other projects and so yeah it's a lot of fun to get involved but a lot of people ask me how well there's there's two sides of this how do I get started and then how do I make sure I avoid burnout as that is the thing that happens for open source developers.

It's a pretty thankless job in general like that, you don't get financially compensated most of the time and stuff. So first of all how to get involved. I have a blog post that goes into more depth on this. It's called what open search project should I contribute to or something like that.

And the assertion is that you contribute that.Is to something that you use regularly or that you have experience with. And so when people ask me, hey, do you have anything that I could work on which does happen occasionally. I always have a hard time answering that because I don't know what you use.

So it'd be better if you find something that you're using and you can work on improving that in some way. So think about the tools or or the libraries that you use and find ways to contribute directly to those to make those things better for yourself and for other users.

And then,On the other side of things if you get too into open source and you kind of lose track of things and and are starting to burn out. My strategy for that is I never work on anything that's an open source that I don't need or don't want to work on just for fun.

And so when somebody opens an issue on my project or something if if it's a feature enhancement or something that they want, but I don't need it then sometimes I'll just ignore it. Normally it's nice to to let them know that they can make a pull request or whatever andEnable them to do that But other times I just don't have the time and so I just kind of ignore it and and you know, they can always fork it.

So it's never like a dead end for them or anything. So yeah, that's kind of how I avoid burnouts. If I don't particularly want to do it for the fun of it, or I don't need to do it for my own stuff then I just don't bother and I've been doing open source for I don't know like six years or so or seven years and it's worked out pretty well for me.

So yeah, I encourage you to get into open source. Have a good time with it. Bye.