I became a member of NeatUpload Open Source Project

I’ll start with a question: who hasn’t ever borrowed at least a small piece of code from the community? I think the number is very close to zero, and why? Is it something about do not reinvent the wheel? And why the community is as huge as nowadays is? The truth is the times have changed, and the old times when a small group of hackers had access to the technology and they were too jealous with their achievements and there were too much selfishness in the air.

Now, as the internet and the communication media have globalized, the exchanges between developers around the world is something common, and probably that’s why you are reading this post. When you start learning a new technology/language/framework (the list might go on), you face many typical problems that a big number of developers around the world faced to, and without the help of some of these experienced developers the work becomes tortuous.

I recently read this post from Scott Hanselman about involving in open source projects and he explains how easy is, even with an example. But, why am I talking about all this? about a year ago, I had to develop a jquery plugin (which occupies several post in this blog) and I decided to publish it for the community. After all, the problem I solved might be the same for other people around the world and, why not to return back the favor to the community? When I needed, I had a lot of code available for just download it and use it. I know, it’s true, not always the documentation is as good as I’d like it was, but that’s something with I have to deal with.

A few weeks ago, I asked myself, what about to show my work to the NeatUpload team? I appreciate their opinion about and that’s what I did. Surprise for me! I received an email from Dean Brettle and Joe Audette celebrating my job and inviting me to join in the project.

My answer was very fast and now I am a member of NeatUpload project. My first contribution was to make the translations for Spanish language in the resources. According to joe and Dean, in the next release, will be included the plugin, documentation and examples mentioned in the early post in this blog. And of course, the further NeatUpload releases will include the last version of jquery.neatupload.

Conclusion, contribute to open source has no cost, is not hard to do, and the benefits you give to the community is returned back when you search for doubt in stackoverflow or just Google. So, contribute!