It’s been a while since I last added a blog post, much to my dismay I might add. With a lot of stuff going on at work I feel that my head is not in a place where I can easily sit myself down for learning new things. Long shifts and bad sleep are not ingredients for a growth mindset haha. Anyway, for now I do a small blog post to share my feelings regarding the Open Source Community.
As you all know, an important aspect of learning new things is to actually go out there and try new stuff which also means trying out code from ‘Open Source’ projects. Open Source is the term for software source code that both companies and amateurs make available for other to use or adapt, without having to pay for it. This is in contrast with, for example, paid software like Microsoft Word; you can use the software but you dont get to see how it has been made.
To learn new things I follow several tutorials from the Open Source community as well as trying out software from other people. This means downloading, the source see if you can get it to work or make changes. I find this really helpful although sometimes a project requires more knowledge than I have at the moment.
Recently I tried three different projects to see if I coudl them to work: one for the Arduino (see also First project: rediscover Arduino), one for learning Python and one other projects. Two of these projects were hobby projects maintained by hobbyists like myself and one was maintaind by a tutor for Python.
For two of the three projects I had questions on how to get the software to work. In both instances I reached out to the developers with, what they undoubtedly thought, were very basic questions. The responses I got were very inclusive and helpful; they showed me how to solve the problem I had (one was adding a few lines, the other it turned out that I was missing some software that was not documented).
As you can imagine learning a new skillset is so much easier with such an open and welcoming community. None gave me the feeling I was incompetent or not worth the time and showed me what I need to do to grow.
So big shoutout to the Open Source community! May I one day return the favor (but a little more experience of my side is required ;-))