How to Help the Dev Community by Solving your Own Problems

Hey! My name is Mike Alfa. And I would like to share my thoughts on open source.

All developers use other people's brainwork every day and take it for granted - if you want to get some functionality - you download a "dependency" and you have it. If you want something more complicated - a couple of dependencies. Well, something very complicated - you have to write code.

I'm talking about Open Source solutions that save us all tens of thousands of development hours, and billions of dollars and save us from millions of bugs. Just imagine, you are starting a new project and you have to reinvent the Backend framework from zero to write a simple CRUD. Or creating each of your new online stores as a reactive framework written from scratch in the style of those that were written before React and Angular.

Of course, you don’t need to write all this from scratch every time. Business indicators are very important for a business, and therefore these decisions made on the knee would stretch from project to project, proprietary, full of heaps of various bugs, and incredibly difficult to support, develop and maintain plus a high learning curve.

Perhaps, over time, some companies would release their more or less efficient and high-quality software solutions to the market (well, the same Backend / Client frameworks) and sell them to us. That would be "cool" - if you want to convert JSON to Excel at the frontend in a couple of lines of code - you will pay $100 (per month, this is a subscription!).

What if you want to be able to see who on your team wrote the code beside you? When? What were the changes? What was written 2 years ago on Thursday at 4:59 PM and raise this version locally? Well, you owe another $100-500 per month!

Imagine a world without Open Source (built on the shoulders of enthusiasts who spend their time solving other people's problems for free). I don't think anyone would want to be in such an extremely bleak future tomorrow.

Fortunately, so far our world is not going to this. But if you delve into this topic, you can find a lot of articles and news about how developers abandon their creations due to user toxicity (developers who constantly want new features, yesterday, for free, fixing super-specific bugs, or teach unfortunate open-source writers how to write what they write correctly).

All this is not particularly conducive to writing free, high-quality, and affordable code at your fingertips. But there is a solution and it is very simple.

You write something that can be used not only by you and in your project. Or maybe you just plan to reuse it in another project? Excellent - this entity is separable and selectable. It can be made into a separate project.

You can work to improve the quality of the code in it, cover it with tests, and provide other people with use too - to make their contribution. Or if you find some bug in a library you downloaded from your favorite package repository - fix it instead of opening another issue. Do a good deed.

And finally - it's not only us developers who need it. We don't write code to brag about who has it better or faster (at least most of us), we write it to solve BUSINESS problems, that brings in money for the business.

And the business is primarily interested in such a trivial problem as, for example, the notorious generation of Excel on the client, being solved in a few hours (well, maximum - days), instead of months, so the business should help the development of Open Source no less than the developers themselves.

Allocate time for what is described in the paragraph above. Sponsor high-quality and useful solutions for the whole world. Encourage the aspirations of your developers in this direction (and if there are no such aspirations, show them this note).

Hopefully, with this, there will be more "good" in the world, your tasks will be solved faster, and you will spend less money on simple platitudes, and instead of inventing another how to add 10 spaces to the left, your developers will be able to the button exactly the color you want to want to 😀.

Feel free to follow my example and make your contribution.