Open Source Done Right

6 February 2015
How a positive experience can inspire you!

So I had a pretty neat experience over the last couple of days with the guys from ScriptCS.

I’ve been building up a suite of ScriptCS scripts which address a number of recurring tasks which have popped up during the project I’m currently working on.

However I ran into a pretty nasty bug which stopped me in my tracks!

After some pretty useless googling, I pinged a twitter message to Glenn Block which got the ball rolling.

The response I received was nothing short of amazing.

Honestly, I kind of expected the response that you see from time to time - “thanks we’ll add that to the backlog and get back to you”. However, I received the opposite and it was as amazing as it was unexpected.

Quick Response

While the fix was reasonably simple, reproducing the bug and identifying the root cause was pretty involved.

I guess in another situation I would have been waiting a while to get my hands on the fix, and with no real workarounds I would have been in trouble.

But the dedication of the developers contributing to the project and the owners of the repository who were really quick to respond to the bug and integrate the patch into framework meant that I had the bug resolved and the framework upgraded in pretty much 24 hours.

Amazing.

I realise this may not be standard of service for all Open Source projects and I don’t think it’s fair to expect it, however it is the standard that I think we should aspire to!

Inspiration

Open Source provides a way to interact with people around the world that you wouldn’t normally interact with.

While I knew of Glenn from his great work on the Web API platform (among others), he is not someone who I had spoken to before. However, due to his public contributions to ScriptCS I knew that he was the guy to ask first.

I’m very glad that I did.

The washup? Inspiration.

Inspired to create this blog for a start!

Further, I’m going to contribute more to the Open Source frameworks I use.

So thank you Glenn Block, Adam Ralph and everyone associated with ScriptCS.

Written on February 6, 2015