What I’ve Learned Working On Open Source And Why I Think Everyone Else Should Too

Over the past 3 months I’ve taken a break from writing an article a week to contribute to open source. In this article I will be talking about what I’ve learnt, experienced and worked on, and how that has changed the way I interact with the community and code.

What I’ve worked on

Over these 3 months I’ve found myself working on everything from web3 SDKs to Solid.js documentation. I initially started my open source journey last year with VelocityX a Flutter UI framework. I started out by contributing to their documentation little by little and correcting any mistakes that there might be.

Over the past few months however, I’ve been working in the Solid.js community which I’ve been very passionate about for some time now. I’ve been writing documentation for the new Solid.js docs and I’m really excited for the community to see what we’ve been building when it’s ready.

I started working on the Supabase Auth UI kit recently, through expanding their Auth UI kit to support Solid.js. I also have plans on writing documentation for them as well in regards to Solid.js and how Solid.js developers can get started with Supabase.

From time to time I also dabble in web3 SDKs here and there. My most recent work was with the quickswap-sdk-lite package, this is mostly a fork of the simple-sushiswap-sdk package built by Josh Stevens, just with a few key things changed, such as the chainId, abi.json files and a little more. I also planned on expanding the Orcaswap typescript sdk but I haven’t found the time to yet.

I’ve also released a few packages on NPM and pub.dev but those solve very very specific problems so they won’t be of much use to many devs, but feel free to take a look at either of my profiles.

What I’ve learnt

As a software developer with a couple years of experience, finding a job hasn’t been easy. After applying for hundreds of roles and not even making it to the interview stage of most of them I had decided that I will carve my own path and work on open source in the meantime or even full-time, whether that be writing documentation, building software or just helping out community members.

I decided to start writing documentation for the Solid.js community. I found this as a way to help beginner and experienced developers get started with Solid.js. Another community I started contributing to is the Supabase community, as I am helping them expand their Auth UI library and plan on writing documentation which pertains to Solid.js.

While working in these communities over the past months I’ve realized that software development shouldn’t be solely based around making money, building cool stuff all the time, and creating SAASs or startups. It should also be about community building, software management and documentation, and knowledge sharing. After all, none of us as software developers would be where we are today if someone decided not to share their knowledge and just kept on building new things without explaining how he or she did it. This is one thing that a majority of software developers are missing, the ability to teach, write, and convey ideas at different levels of understanding.

Nobody is an island. As software developers we need to learn how to share our knowledge before moving forward and leaving everyone else behind.

The Experience Gained / Conclusion

In summary I’ve really gained a lot while working on open source. From developing web3 SDKs to writing documentation for Solid.js, open source is something that I have come to fall in love with. In just the few months that I’ve been doing this I’ve had the opportunity to connect with so many cool people, one of which being Ryan Carniato.

As a developer I highly recommend getting involved in open source at least once in your career, and when I say open source I mean contribute to a well known open source library, package, SDK or whatever it might be, I guarantee you that you’ll learn a lot from the experience.

This was just a quick update article to let you guys know what I’ve been doing over the past month and what I will be doing for the time being. If you would like to reach out don’t be afraid to DM me on Twitter or if you’ve already left twitter then feel free to add me on Discord. Bye for now 👋.