If you are involved in the tech industry (or just getting started) you may have heard the term “open source” at least once. Open source projects are everywhere, on the web, on your computer, on your phone, etc. You use technology that is open source everyday, pretty amazing, isn’t it?
Because it’s important. I want to encourage you to collaborate with other developers the right way, I also want to share my personal experience, I’ve been collaborating writing code since 2011 and met awesome people from all places around the world in the process, think about it, that’s something great that wasn’t possible to do years ago.
I’m about to give you an introduction to the very fundamentals of what open source is and what is not, everything you are about to read is my personal opinion, so if you disagree with what I’m saying at some point it’s ok, but keep in mind that what I wrote is based on my experience with the open source world.
You can learn from other people's code to write better code yourself. Seeing an open source project you've worked on with other developers come together is one of the most rewarding feelings I've experienced as a developer, specially if it’s a big one with a lot of stars and forks on GitHub.
Show what you’ve built instead of talking about it. Because code wins arguments, right?, your contributions to open source communities are amazingly attractive for employers, forget about writing a resume of how awesome you are... share links, repos and photos instead, to show the things you’ve worked on.