Contributing to the community as a developer
Abdo Rakhma / June 18, 2020
5 min read
Hello world of blogging! this is literally the first blog I write in my entire life and hopefully, it will be the beginning of a long journey of sharing knowledge with all of you out there, which is a very small thing to do when it comes to all the help I got from the community throughout my journey as a software engineer.
My motives to contribute#
There can't be any stronger motive than feeling grateful for all those hours/days we all saved looking for a solution for a bug, an answer to a question, or an explanation to a behavior that we couldn't understand, that somebody decided to share on the internet. At that moment, whoever shared that answer/solution was an actual Hero. A hero who decided to step up, sacrifice a little bit of their time for the common good, a little bit of time to save for others a lot of time, which is in itself another reason that justifies that Not all heroes were capes 💪🏽 Another motive for me is the fact that by sharing your experiences/learnings will ultimately make you eager to learn new things, all part of the learning cycle, where you learn, you practice, you share and then you learn something new so you can practice and share.
Ways to contribute#
Now that we all agree that contributing and giving to the community is a good thing to do, maybe even a cool thing to do especially with introducing the notion of heroism, the next logical question is, how can I contribute to the community as a software engineer? Well from my little humble experience, I tried to focus on these ways ways 🔍
Stack Overflow#
It's almost impossible to be a software developer without checking Stackoverflow for answers 😂. it's the go-to when it comes to putting an end to your unsuccessful attempts to find solutions to a resilient problem that you can't solve on your own. which is the exact reason why I thought that is a great start for contributing to the world of software engineering. It's been since mid-2017 when I decided to start posting both questions and answers on Stackoverflow. I have a routine of checking newly posted questions every morning for 15 minutes before work, which was more enough to at least answer one question, upvote an answer, or write a comment. By the time of writing this blog, I reached 2000+ reputation points on Stackoverflow, which is in itself a motivation for me to reach higher reputation points and make more of an impact 🤩
The Open source#
One of the most fun and impactful ways to share your knowledge and experience is to CREATE. On Github, there are a plethora of open source projects that people volunteered to share with the world, to make people's lives easier saving them a lot of hassle of reinventing the wheel. It could be a library that you like and you want to propose a feature to be included in, or it is a full blown-project that you think is worthy of sharing with others, what matters is you stepping forward and helping out the community. I have always been passionate about creating stuff that people would use, and during my journey, I have tried to make some little projects that I shared with the community:
I also tried to contribute to existing projects by whether adding new functionalities, fixing bugs, or proposing improvements...
Social Media#
Other ways you can help the community with is by sharing your knowledge and proposing help on Social media, whether it is Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin, the goal is similar, is trying to answer what you can, and share what can be valuable for others 👌🏼 A way that I find interesting, is being part of Software development groups on social media, where people post often questions and answers about their daily struggles when it comes to tech, where it is easy to reach out and share your answers/perspectives.
Writing Blogs#
Finally, for me, a great way to make an impact and contribute to the community is to write blogs about the stuff you experience and stuff you're passionate about 🥰 And this is exactly what made me start blogging, which is the fact that I can share more knowledge by writing, which makes information available and gives me more motivation to learn more in order to share more. There are already dozens of platform that allow you to do that like:
Many tools for one goal, sharing your experience.
Final thoughts#
This is my beginning in blogging, I'm very excited and chuffed to bits to write more, share more, and more importantly to learn more. My main goals for this year, when it comes to my contribution to the community, will be:
- 📦 Writing at least 1 open-source library a year.
- 📄 Writing 2 blogs a month.
- ✅ Answering 4 Questions per month on Stackoverflow.