Companies and open-source: a win for everyone
How using open source to help others can benefit you and your company.
This article is based on what I experienced as a React Native lead developer while working @ Brigad. I want to share what contributing allowed me to achieve, hoping to inspire you to do the same or help you encourage your peers around to do the same.
Open source is good for you
Recently, I have been invited to Facebook HQ in London as part of a React Native core contributors 3 days summit (thanks to Christoph Nakazawa). And this really made me realize why I love my job. 💛
How did I end up there? Well, it all started with my first contribution to react-native. Which was then followed by another one. And one after that. And discussing with other contributors. And helping people. And now I’m maintaining the first component that was extracted as part of the lean core effort: WebView.
During the event, it really felt good as we were there to help people and discuss with each other: The main goal was to bring the core contributors of React Native and Jest together into one place and we also did a bunch of issue triage. I feel like we achieved a lot more than that. We also managed to get to know each other. 👋
Overall it feels great to be part of a community, and I think that react-native community is a great one. It’s also a huge and very challenging one as everything you do has quite a lot of impact. 👊
We managed to triage more than 300 issues (don’t worry there are still some open ones if you want to help 👀). And this is what open source is about: being part of a bigger group that allows you to deal with problems and find solutions faster. 🔥
But there’s more, it’s also very encouraging when people acknowledge that work is being done. Because these are the rewards of open source as an individual. You can share what you are doing with others, by traveling, going to meetups, or by giving talks. 🤓
Open-source will provide you with access to a lot of experience. 📚
Open source is good for your company
Of course, at first, it might seem inefficient to spend a little bit extra time to create pull requests, discuss with others that will challenge your work, but open-source is not working for others, it’s working with others. 😙
I can testify that every minute I spent doing open-source work, it has allowed me to save time later on. As an example: let’s say that you’ve already helped out a library maintainer by contributing before and now you want to add a new feature that your company needs. Given your existing relationship with the maintainer you are most likely able to discuss this with them freely, get feedback, answers to any questions about implementation and perhaps even work together to implement it, all because you’ve shown a willingness to help out before. 🤝
Everyone doing open-source is trying to achieve a common goal, make everything better. Not everyone has the same way to do it or the same motivations, but I’ve certainly never seen a pull request that would intentionally make something worse. 🙌
Encouraging developers in your company to do that will also attract people to your company because they know the advantage they can get from doing open-source, so you can hire better profiles. Keeping a good mood is essential to have a healthy workplace. 💪
But encouraging people to do open-source does not mean they have to spend all their time working on it, or that they have to do a certain amount of time per week. It should always stay on a voluntary basis and people should still be able to prioritize any task over it if needed. The worst thing that could happen to anyone is burning out due to too much pressure, so do not let open-source be a duty, let it be a treat. 🍬
I hope to see you all contributing to open-source projects or/and encouraging people to do so, as we will never be too many. 🎉
I’d like to thank my company, Brigad, for encouraging me to do all these things. Also, huge thanks to the React Native Community, where working with everyone is awesome. 💯
