Last friday we started a new project at Group Buddies, the Open Source Fridays. This means that for four hours every Friday, every one at GB will be contributing to OSS at some level. It can be by writing documentation, opening pull requests on other people's projects or creating our own.
We feel this is a great to way to give back to the community while learning new things from others, and we are very excited about what may arise from this.
At the end of each week we'll try to post a summary of what we have done for the Open Source community.
Here's what we've done on our first Open Source Friday:
- Me and Miguel rewrote some of our internal protocols and added one on how to provision a Digital Ocean server.
- Gabriel worked on the docs for
grunt-phonegapand fiddled around with HabitRPG. - João and Miguel also worked on the design of a Unity3D game they've been hacking in their spare time. More to come in the next few weeks...
- Bruno wrote an article about style guides, pattern libraries, UI kits and writing CSS/SASS in general. It is almost ready to be posted right here on our blog, so stay tuned!
Overall, it was a good experience that we'll keep on doing for the next few weeks, at least.
Given that this was the first edition we had to work out some of the kinks, such as what we considered to be "Open" and what was the goal of each session. We defined that anything that is or is going to be public in the near future is considered "Open" and that each session should be output oriented (even if we can't get there in one session).
Hope this leads you guys to implement some variation of it in your companies (if you have the power to) and give us your feedback. If you already do this or simply like the idea, feel free to give feedback anyway. There's still a lot we can do regarding this matter and a lot we can change, so new ideas are welcome.
Contribute away! ;)