Giving Back to Open Source

"Let me Google that for you". Most software developers will spend their days searching the internet to answer problems. It's quite rare to be working on an issue that is unique and usually, from a code library on NPM or an answer from Stack Overflow the solution to whatever you're working on can be found through a carefully crafted Google search (other search engines are available, I'm told).

This is all possible because of Open Source.

Freely available, community-driven content for use by anybody.

GitHub, Wikipedia, NPM, NuGet, Stack Overflow and much more are the endless fountains of knowledge that are only possible thanks to Open Source.

It's crazy to think that not many years ago, a mobile device ODM had a No Open Source Allowed clause in their contract. This would be unimaginable today and is tantamount to saying No Innovation Here.

Back in the modern world, we at Intoware, like most software businesses, are a very willing consumer of the Open Source community. We use:

• Docker and Kubernetes (containers ftw)
• Microsoft .NET Core Framework
• MongoDB
• And much, much more...

The huge amount of Open Source content, code and projects are truly a great achievement fostered and curated by millions of dedicated, hard-working individuals.

Our most popular and well-loved software and hardware products wouldn't be possible without the Open Source community

Recently I was speaking to the Tillster and was pondering about how Intoware could give back ... so, introducing

On May the 29th, Intoware will spend time "giving back". Some of the team are going to incubate their own Open Source projects, others will write blog posts and tutorials while some will go on a Wikipedia editing spree.

Even if somebody wants to update the page for The Who then that's great also!

We've had some superb suggestions from the team as to how they can contribute. Over the next few weeks and months, we'll be spotlighting the entries and the contributors behind them.

For my own submission, I'll be incubating a new project to help auto-scale Kubernetes containers based on Hangfire metrics. In short, Hangfire is an awesome utility that we use within our software to manage background tasks (thumbnail generation, sending emails etc...). I'll be creating a small library to auto-scale based on the number of pending tasks. In a future post, I'll go into more details as to how I got on (with the source code of course).

If Contributefest is a success (and why wouldn't be?) then hopefully it'll be the first of many. I'm really excited to see this event take shape and I look forward to working with the amazing team at Intoware on their own contributions to the Open Source world.

In closing, this period of Lockdown has been quite surreal. In some ways, our day jobs as software developers haven't really changed. But, the sense of collaboration and community that we get from being in the office is being challenged in these uncertain times. Contributefest is an opportunity to do something different, give back to the Open Source community and encourage collaboration within the business in ways that isn't easy in the current climate.

GO, TEAM!