Vaughan Reid's blog

Why I started contributing to open source

About a month ago I made my first commit to the grpc-dotnet project. It was a small change but it was more about the intent for me. Since then I’ve submitted a few other pull requests to that project and also the aspnetcore project. Some have been merged and others are waiting.

Some would say that its quite a lot of work for no real gain but to me, these are really important projects that I’m really interested in. That on its own should be a reason to get involved!

At my day job we have been doing quite a lot of work with .net core and K8s and you don’t get very far without ASP.NET Core. In the near future I can also see gRPC gaining a lot more traction with its impressive performance and already good tooling.

Its also really interesting to see how these projects are structured and what they focus on. At most companies its very hard to match the complexity and scale of the asp.net core solution and so its a great lesson in how to manage those dependencies.

Another great reason to get involved is that you get direct access to amazing developers who are willing to look at your code and help you with improvements. That on its own will help your career immensely.

The last reason is that its actually quite easy to just get involved. Most of my changes so far were completed in between 15 minutes and an hour. I’m sure they might get a little more involved as I do more but even now its great to feel that you are involved in something bigger.