It's time for open source!

I love open source. My employer, IBM, loves open source so much that it paid roughly $34BN for Red Hat. The ability for open source to unleash creativity and create ecosystems that generate real value is unmatched. But taking that first step into that big ocean is hard. How can I best contribute? What if my code is rubbish? (and much of mine is!).

I worked my way towards feeling confident enough to contribute by building robots from open source software and commodity hardware. My weekends for the last five years have allowed me to learn glorious open source frameworks and tools such node-Red, JQuery, AngularJS, React, Python and Redis. There's absolutely no way I could have built the sophisticated robots I've built without leveraging open source. I publish my own code under Creative Commons open source . This is a great way to learn - and I couldn't embarrass myself too much! Finding out that I've inspired people to take my code and make their own robots (especially when those people are kids) still makes me very happy indeed.

Then, a couple of years ago, I was working on a volunteer project to assist with the planning of future healthcare services (using yet more open source including Jupyter notebooks, PuLP, GLPK and pandas). We needed an SVG React interactive map, but there wasn't one available. Forking an existing repository, creating a new map and then contributing it back was a few hours work, but it felt like a big step. Within a few days, my contribution was up there for anyone to reuse. Cool.

So this weekend I felt brave enough to create my own custom watch app for the Bangle.js JavaScript smart watch. Today its amazing KickStarter creator Gordon Williams very kindly published it on the App Store for anyone to download and use. Being part of such a brilliant and vibrant community is a real honour and buzz (quite literally when the watch's alarm goes off).

So if you're thinking taking the plunge and learning how to contribute, please do so. My experience so far has been that people are welcoming, friendly and encouraging, so be brave! If you feel like you need some guidance then there are some excellent introductory sites that will help you out.

Don't just consume open source, contribute to it - it's about time!

Richard Hopkins, IBM Distinguished Engineer CEng FIET, President IBM Academy of Technology