3 Reasons Why You Should Contribute to Open Source in 2024

2024 will be the 12th year since I made my first open source contribution.

Since then I have:

• Contributed to a global scale infrastructure GitHub Container Registry


• Built a network of friends from all over the world


• Started an Open Source Company

In this article, I will share the top 3 out of my 9934 reasons to start contributing to open source.

If you’re looking to learn new skills, and grow your professional network and career while working on projects you care about, just hear me out for the next 3 minutes.

Let’s dive in! 🚀

TL;DR

• Reason #1: You can work on whatever you want


• Reason #2: You can create value for other people


• Reason #3: You can showcase your skills


• Wrapping Up

Reason #1: You can work on whatever you want

With open source, you get the freedom to work on projects that you are passionate about. You can explore your interests, and learn new skills, without needing to meet a deadline.

This is very different from usual corporate work i.e. mostly closed source. And you are restricted to working on a specific set of technologies. In the long term, it can impact your technical growth and ability to adapt to industry changes.

It doesn’t need to be that way.

Take it from me. In previous roles, I was working in languages that I wasn’t interested in. I literally felt like my skills were stagnating. As a result, I was falling out of ‘love’ with programming.

But then I started working on open source projects in my spare time. And boy that helped. I was free to learn new languages and work on projects exciting to me.

Getting started with open source was one of the best decisions of my life!

And the best part is you can start small and slowly ramp up at your own pace. At Flipt, we have good first issues specifically for first-time contributors.

All you need to do is show your interest by commenting on the issue and we will help you out in making your first contribution.

Isn’t that amazing? 🙂

Reason #2: You can create value for other people

Right now, you are sitting on a lot of static knowledge that you have gained over the years with your professional and personal experience. Open source provides you an active community of developers who you can share it with and make a positive impact on the project.

It’s one of the most fulfilling things you’ll do as a developer. I’ll take the case of our contributor

# in one terminal session

docker run -it --rm --name minio \

  -e MINIO_ROOT_USER=user -e MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD=password -p 9009:9009 \

  quay.io/minio/minio:latest server /data --address ":9009"

# in another session first use the minio provisioner binary

# this pushes the contents of the provided directory into a bucket in minio

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=user AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=password \

  go run ./build/internal/cmd/minio/... -minio-url http://localhost:9009 -testdata-dir ./internal/storage/fs/s3/testdata

# then you can run the test for `fs.Source`

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=user AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=password TEST_S3_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:9009 \

  go test -v ./internal/storage/fs/s3/...