Wade Arnold

I have had a tremendous education over the last year in getting to work on Flex 4 and the Zend Framework. Two exceptional open source projects that are growing daily in both contributers and community. They are also two projects that get a bad rap because they are supported by a “known” company. Some other open source favorites such as MySQL are getting this wrap too. The funny thing about both these projects is that the code is 90% driven and coded by the community and the remaining 10% is the types of additions that the community needs but Adobe and Zend do because they can’t get someone like me add them. By having a parent company back the open source initiative you have access to people that are paid to work on the project. This means that they know why decisions have been made over time, common mistakes, and best practices. They also make for the best projects to be your first open source project because of the support.  

So why should you help?

• Learn about software architecture from a HUGE project so you can use those concepts in your own projects.
• Understand who is really behind that code base that is powering your startup, enterprise, life’s work.
• Learn concepts and applications that are necessary for large teams that you can use in your own organization
• Receive a minimal of 50+ emails a weekend asking why you have yet to do XYZ and can you have that completed next week!
• Work on the project that you actually are using. 

But I am not that good of a programmer. 

• Ahh this is where you relize that you have to be a part of a large project to become a good programmer. 
• We need documentation, in the trunk of the project not on your blog.
• We need test cases for bugs. 
• We need people answering “bug” questions that are really just people that did not RTFM. But they distract the core from working on new features. And the manual probably sucks too.
• We need best practice documents. Most open source documentation is around getting started and not best practices. 
• We need real work examples to showcase how the application can be used.

Commit to adding something to the community that you are a part of in ’09. If you are reading my blog you know how important open source is to you! My company and coding career will forever be changed because of all the support, best practices, and advice I received from Peter, Wil, Stas, and specifically Matthew. I hope you engage and learn in ’09 too.

Happy New Year!

Flash Platform, Zend_Amf