My Journey into Open Source: From Atari to GitHub

As I reflect on my open source journey, it's fascinating to trace back the timeline to my very first contribution, which began in the late 1980s with the Atari ST. While I started using open source software early on, my initial foray into making contributions to open source projects didn't occur until the advent of the Internet and a Unix-based computer that allowed me to develop further beyond my previous machine.

An Early Contribution to GNU M4

One of my notable early contributions was to the GNU M4 project, specifically related to the NextStep OS. The file THANKS in the M4 project even mentions an old email address of mine, which likely occurred around 1993. These small yet impactful contributions laid the foundation for my journey into open source.

Contributions in the X Window System Era

Diving deeper into my contributions, I recall working on projects like Xfig and Xgraph, integral tools in the early days of X Windows on HP-UX. Xfig allowed users to draw objects similar to Visio or PowerPoint, while Xgraph was a software for drawing plots that could be easily imported into LaTeX or troff. These were critical tools for technical documentation and data visualization.

Flappy-SVG and FOSSASIA

My first pull request (PR) was made in January 2016, which marks the beginning of my active contributions to open source projects. I contributed to flappy-svg, a project by FOSSASIA. I added hide_layer and show_layer methods to make the project more user-friendly. The focus of my contributions at this stage was code refactoring.

I continued to contribute to the same repository, adding a couple of features and improving the existing ones. My contributions to open source weren't limited to a single project; I started working on the FreedomBox project and later contributed to the Mozilla Firefox developer tools.

Contributions in the Late 20th Century

Long before my contributions to Flappy-SVG and FreedomBox, I made significant contributions to the Linux utility ttysnoop. This small utility was commonly used for tech support, where system administrators would spy on user terminals to help them. However, the compact design of ttysnoop with a hard-coded array of 32 elements was a limitation as user numbers grew. I expanded the array and sent a patch, but I was unsure if it entered the distribution.

Back then, the world was very different. The web was in its infancy, and web search engines were still in their nascent stages. Version control tools were primarily CVS, and most projects lacked their own repositories due to limited server space and stringent regulations. VMs for development were not yet common, and GitHub, SourceForge, and similar collaborative platforms hadn't been invented yet. The community was centered around contributions to the GNU project and similar initiatives.

Reflecting on these early contributions, it's evident that open source contributions were messier and more ad-hoc. Each community had its own processes, and distribution of contributions was often informal. However, these early experiences set the foundation for the structured and collaborative open source ecosystem we see today.