i created a LCARS theme for enlightenment 16 circa 2004 and posted it online; it got 3 downloads. lol

I wrote a function to display numbers as words in my native language, which has a lot of strange conventions. The lead dev immediately saw that this was my first attempt at Lua, and optimized my code. Thing is, now it’s broken for numbers above 1000000000, but it’s unlikely that anyone will notice and I was too shy to correct the main dev.

One part of my full time job these past fifteen plus years has been to help maintain a foundational open source library that my employer and many many others are dependent on.

When it comes to total impact of open source work, I’m unlikely to ever surpass that.

I didn’t get in to vibe coding and didn’t start pushing commits of trash code.

Translating FOSS and relevant projects/websites into my native language, all the time

I made a feature request for Nextcloud Tasks that was included in the roadmap around five years ago. One day it might even be implemented. They just need to sort out repeating tasks first, and after 8 years how much more time would anybody need?

Any day now.

Edit: I genuinely expect the NC team to implement AI features before they add front-end support (back-end has supported reoccuring tasks for years).

Honestly, since I’m not very techie and unable to donate (for now) my main contributions are simply regularly using open source software. I’ve switched a good portion of my daily online services to FOSS alternatives. It’s fun to find them and give them a shot.

I maintained a VPN tool for years.

I also worked as OS Security for a company that was paying MANY people to maintain an enterprise Linux distro and all the parts in it, based on their ridiculously deep knowledge of the Unix kernel and Unix apps. I will never have a job or a mission half as awesome as that was. And for the linux dev labour the company helped finance, it shouldn’t be so hated; but it is.

There’s a ‘joke’ that goes something like “How do you know if someone is vegan and uses Linux? Don’t worry, they will let you know…” with many variations. Thus, I avoid mentioning that I use Linux, to avoid being ‘that guy’. If that makes sense? The operating system might be more approachable if there were less people being pretentious about it, in my opinion. (BTW, I use Manjaro.)

I’ll also suggest FOSS as alternatives when I hear people complain about proprietary software, if the above does not feel like it would apply.

When I am having problems, I research error messages and warnings, read the man pages and old forum posts that might be related, attempt to diagnose the issue myself and try to do everything I can to avoid bothering the devs. This is more due to anxiety but I think it helps to not waste anyones time but my own. Moreso with user-caused problems as opposed to actual bugs.

Finally, one time someone posted a negative rant about a FOSS application. It referenced comments the sole dev of the program made on github as being toxic. I pored through thousands of comments on the programs github page, literally every comment that it had, to find these supposed toxic comments. Instead I saw a dev being plagued by the most trivial, bullshit problems, often things that had nothing to do with his app whatsoever, with him responding in ways no sane person would think was toxic. So I made sure to call that out on the negative rant, asking them to clarify what led to their criticism. They were unable to do so and instead reverted to name calling, making shit up and using multiple accounts to try to troll me, to no avail. I suspect it was some sort of ‘hit piece’ attempting to draw away users from the app for reasons beyond me. I don’t even use the program it was about.

They may not be code-based contributions but I hope they help, even if only slightly.

I helped with the initial Aarch64 emulation support for qemu as well as working with others to make multi-threaded system emulation a thing. I maintain a number of subsystems but perhaps the biggest impact was implementing the cross compilation support that enabled the TCG testing to be run by anyone including eventually the CI system. This is greatly helped by being a paid gig for the last 12 years.

I’ve done a fair bit of other stuff over my many decades of using FLOSS including maintain a couple of moderately popular Emacs packages. I’ve got drive by patches in loads of projects as I like to fix things up as I go.

1. Using software; 2. Telling my friends about it; 3. Helping others in forums; 4. Donating money, or bitcoin when available; 5. Running software that helps the network (Full Bitcoin Node, Tor Relay, SheepIT Render Farm - for Blender); 6. Translating.

Made an Android app mainly for myself, fairly niche use case. A few years later it somehow has 10k+ users (a rough estimate since there’s no telemetry).

I’ve submitted a few pull requests to some self hosting software repos. I’ve also put in a lot of time editing a large crowd sourced data set. Currently working on a crowd sourced set of translations on old public domain comics.

I use it

I’ve submitted PRs and patches to well known projects like Drupal, three.js and Wordpress. Some of them even get merged lol… Also if I experience a problem and find an open issue I’ll add my 2c if I think it’s useful. To be honest I think in open source participating in issue comments and lodging quality tickets is as important as writing the code side of things. I have my own open source projects and thoroughly document information I think could be useful for others.

I promote FOSS in my personal and professional life where I can, and try my best to practise what I preach. Recently managed to convinced my financial counsellor from local government to look into LibreOffice which I’m quite chuffed with. They didn’t even know free software existed and are excited to tell others small businesses about using it to save money.