Week 9: The unexpected virtue of ignorance
It’s always exciting to start a new phase at the academy program, you never know what to expect, it’s like a rollercoaster of emotions, some times you’re at your highest point but suddenly you fall and it’s hard to recover from that. But don’t get me wrong, you are also constantly improving, learning, discovering new things and that’s what really matters because that’s something that you cannot get that easily in other places.
This week has been something very remarkable, for so long I have listened about open source, it’s something that everyone who is involved in the IT industry knows about, or at least has an idea of what it is, but in my case, I never stopped and dig enough to see the whole picture, for so long I believed that if you wanted to use an open-source project or contributed to it you were allowed to but with certain restrictions (there still some restrictions but they work differently). Let me explain, what I used to believe about open-source projects was that if you wanted to make some changes or improve the project, you were allowed to but, you were going to work based on the source code, but you cannot modify, you add to it on your own project. It was a weird way of seeing things at that moment, but it helps me to sort things out.
Now I have to work on one of those projects, and it’s kind of intimidating, you start to look for some repositories where you can make a few contributions, but then you see how advanced the project is, and how many people is involved, and it’s hard to find your place there, even more, when you’re beginning in this world. Although there’s some hope, once you start to dig into Github, you discover the real magic, the community is so big, but they are also very helpful, you leave a comment asking if they could assign the issue to you, and some people offer their help, some other tell you that you should look for another problem if this is your first time because it may be too complicated, there are so many people moving around and it becomes very impressive the reach that this projects may have.
I’m still overwhelmed with what will come in the next weeks, but I’m also excited, I want to see how far can I go, I want to keep learning, it won’t be easy, it never is, but we’ll see, there’s still a long way down the road.