I encourage you to get into (burnout free) open source

Hey friends so I wanted to talk a little bit about open source. I have been

doing open source for almost as long as I've been doing software

development. And it has been just an enormous benefit to me. I I can't tell

you how how much I've learned and how much of what I know I learned through

open source and so I strongly advise people to get into open source for

various reasons.

In particular, like it makes you a better software developer, you write

higher quality software, you can reuse the software that you create.In a

other projects and so yeah it's a lot of fun to get involved but a lot of

people ask me how well there's there's two sides of this how do I get

started and then how do I make sure I avoid burnout as that is the thing

that happens for open source developers.

It's a pretty thankless job in general like that, you don't get financially

compensated most of the time and stuff. So first of all how to get

involved. I have a blog post that goes into more depth on this. It's called

what open search project should I contribute to or something like that.

And the assertion is that you contribute that.Is to something that you use

regularly or that you have experience with. And so when people ask me, hey,

do you have anything that I could work on which does happen occasionally. I

always have a hard time answering that because I don't know what you use.

So it'd be better if you find something that you're using and you can work

on improving that in some way. So think about the tools or or the libraries

that you use and find ways to contribute directly to those to make those

things better for yourself and for other users.

And then,On the other side of things if you get too into open source and

you kind of lose track of things and and are starting to burn out. My

strategy for that is I never work on anything that's an open source that I

don't need or don't want to work on just for fun.

And so when somebody opens an issue on my project or something if if it's a

feature enhancement or something that they want, but I don't need it then

sometimes I'll just ignore it. Normally it's nice to to let them know that

they can make a pull request or whatever andEnable them to do that But

other times I just don't have the time and so I just kind of ignore it and

and you know, they can always fork it.

So it's never like a dead end for them or anything. So yeah, that's kind of

how I avoid burnouts. If I don't particularly want to do it for the fun of

it, or I don't need to do it for my own stuff then I just don't bother and

I've been doing open source for I don't know like six years or so or seven

years and it's worked out pretty well for me.

So yeah, I encourage you to get into open source. Have a good time with it.

Bye.