There are a lot of articles about using open source in your company, what are the benefits, what should you do, etc. etc. This blog post isn’t. It’s about your personal and very egoistic benefits of coding open source.

Note that I believe very strongly in open source, but sometimes you get people to do the “right” thing for the “wrong” reasons. I don’t think the following reasons are “wrong”, but are not my personal top motivations for doing open source.

Learn how to read code

In my personal experience I spent only 10-20% percent of my time actually writing code. The rest I use for reading code for code reviews, learning, understanding or finding bugs. Given this distribution of my time, a way to actually get my work done faster is to read code faster.

Contributing to an open source project improves your code reading skills every time as have to

Understand a code base

You learn how to understand a subsystem of a code base, e.g. if you want to extend it for your purpose. You’ll get experienced in drawing the architecture of the project in front of your inner eye and which systems you have to understand in detail and which ones not. Developers which are hired directly after finishing university often feel the need to understand the whole architecture completely to change something. This should only be true for bad, tightly coupled, unmodularized spaghetti architectures.

This ability is so basic and yet overlooked. You will code with more confidence and joy if you are able to focus on the problem itself and not the “what does this actually do”.

Separate style from content

There are a lot of different codes styles, often revealing the “native” language of the code author. Coding in open source projects will improve your skill to read those “accents”. Even more you may learn some new ways of doing things.

And sometimes you see really awful formatted code and you need to remove all the clutter in your head to see the shiny core.

public boolean check()
{
   if(x.equals(y))
   {
      if(y.equals(z))
      {
        return true;
      }
      else
      {
        return false;
      }
   }
   else
   {
       return false;
   }
}

This is nice, when you write it on a block to identify the core problem, but not to translate it literally to code. This is nothing but

public boolean check() {
   return x.equals(y) && y.equals(z);
}

Understand and apply patterns

Sometimes design patterns are obvious, e.g. encoded in the class or method name. However this is not always the case and you learn to spot patterns in code when they are not so obvious, maybe because the author used it by accident or a naming scheme would distract from the actual code.

Implement isolated fixes/features

Nobody likes to review more lines of code than absolutely necessary. Contributing means you keep your changes to a minimum if you want your pull request being accepted. You will be asked to provide tests and docs. And this will get more and more routine, as you will get positive feedback each time you provide a well formed pull request and will keep this practice in your daily job.

Build a reputation

In the end we as developers want to be recognised for our code quality and our abilities to write good software. This is an illusion as HR Managers are most of the time HR guys and not developers. However being an activate part of an open source community build a reputation as other developers know you which may work at the company you apply. And those people can value your work and quality and may be able to influence the HR office. Or they even offer you a job by themselves because you already have showed your skills.

Get Inspired

Most none devs think that coding is an uncreative activity. Well, you know that couldn’t be more far from the truth. Like artist we have to do routine jobs to get started. But like painting a picture, solving a problem needs a lot of creativity. In my personal opinion to be as creative as possible you need an environment as diverse as possible ( this is my main motivation to get more woman in IT. We have only 50% of the possible diversity if we only have men in IT ).

Open Source projects are a great pool for diversity. People from all around the world are working at one peace of code. You only need an open mind and the will to learn and teach. “Beginners mind” is one of the principles in this great article “10 rules being a Zen programmer”. You will get a lot of inspiration to solve problems, which will help you for all of your future coding problems.

Contributing to great libraries means working with great programmers. Image you work together with Albert Einstein on one of his papers, just because you can.