Open source projects not only bring great value to companies, but also bring great value to users themselves.
Now the foundation of most company products is open source projects, from development packages to the products themselves. I even wonder what the world would be like without open source projects. The sharing spirit of the Internet has allowed the Internet to develop so rapidly.
But many people are only limited to using open source projects to help companies quickly build platforms and products. In fact, open source projects can also be your good teachers and friends.
Expand Your Social Network
GitHub, the world’s largest code community, is a great place for socializing. Whether we are developing an open source project together or using an open source project together, relying on open source projects, we have a community and common topics. We attend various technical conferences, and we are brought closer to each other because of these open source projects, forming deep friendships. Long live friends!
Become a Valuable Source of Code Examples
I had a project that needed to read Kafka, but it was my first time working with Kafka’s API. After Googling, I found that those code snippets were too demo-like, and directly copying these code snippets often hides huge dangers. I’ve been reading Spark’s code, so I looked at the code for reading Kafka in Spark. It’s beautifully written, “industrial-grade,” and has good reusability. I think there’s nothing more wonderful than this. I wanted to learn Yarn programming, and besides reading books, I wanted to see what real “industrial-grade” code looks like, so I studied the Yarn-related code in Spark. It’s really a great thing. Open source projects are your real treasure trove of code examples, so dig in and explore!
A Model of Code Standards
Code not only needs to run but also needs to be readable. Every open source project has requirements for code standards, and they are proven to withstand the test of extensive collaboration. For example, Spark’s scala-style-guide standard. When you enter a specific project, you can see how these rules are effectively practiced. Looking at Spark code, you can feel a sense of beauty.
When I saw the line of code framed in red, I was moved to tears.
A Good Tutorial for Programming Languages
I used to be a programmer in many languages: C, PHP, Ruby, Java, Python, JavaScript, Flex. Later I learned Scala, which is a beautiful, academically-oriented language that perfectly unifies object-oriented and functional programming with a powerful type system. I saw many interesting usages from Spark’s source code, and while understanding the open source project, my language knowledge was constantly updated. It is such an excellent teacher, bringing together the experience of many Scala veterans, and I can learn and inherit these through the Spark project.
Yes, open source projects prove a language, make a language successful, are the best evangelists, and are our good language teachers.
Gain Recognition
Whether as a contributor to an open source project or a senior user, you will be admired by many people. Of course, they don’t admire you, but your efforts in the open source project. And everyone can learn more about the open source project from you and make the open source project run more stably on their platforms. Humans are social animals. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it allows programmers to immediately rise to the two highest levels of needs: respect and self-actualization. Well, that’s really great.
Salute to Open Source Projects
Open source projects are our good teachers and friends. Let’s salute them!
Reprinted with permission: Developer Relations »
