The Open Source Journey

For me Open Source is a moral thing… It is giving back to someone who has given you a lot!

So lets go back three years in time… I had just stumbled across this cool programming language called Python, playing around with Django and this is where it all started.

I had this itch to do something cool - something that a lot of people used. So in my pursuit of fame, I kept looking for what I could do until I rediscovered Mozilla - the guys that build Firefox(among the other cool things). Turns out that most of their code is open source and their sites run on Django. Cool!

There was no stopping for me, I jumped right in and found a very tiny(read: insignificant) bug - changing the hex color code in the site footer of mozilla.org. I went ahead and fixed it and it got merged into the main codebase. That is a moment I remember till date - I wrote code that was being run by thousands of people everyday. I had my name in the list of contributors on Github and one of their code developers - pmac also wrote about it on his blog.

That feeling of awesomeness stuck with me and I kept contributing small fixes here and there to a couple more organizations. Fast forwarding to today, I have been selected for Google Summer of Code(GSoC) to work with MDAnalysis to modernize and improve the performance of their testsuite.

So for the next couple of months I’ll be collaborating with the cool folks at MDAnalysis and carve out some cool bits of code. I’ll be basically be doing a major overhaull of their testing framework to make it faster and more maintainable. You’ll surely get to hear about it in the near future!

In real open source, you have the right to control your own destiny.

Linus Torvalds