The Path to Open
This year marks my fourteenth year developing for the web, and I thought it might be fun to reflect on that path that has ultimately led to to my participation in the open communities of Mozilla and Drupal, and to working with ImageX.
Back in 2000, when I first began coding, front-end development wasn’t really a ‘thing’ yet. I remember blink tags, ‘Under Construction’ animated gifs, and that layout was all about HTML tables :)
My first experience programming was with Active Server Pages. ASP, for those who don’t know, was Microsoft’s first server-side scripting engine. It was amazing technology at the time - I once wrote a Content Management System in ASP. My ‘Microsoft path’ would continue for years, transitioning to Visual Basic and then .NET. I learned a lot about software architecture during this time.
I also felt a growing unease at the never-ending cost of developing, maintaining, licensing and upgrading Microsoft projects, especially if requirements included 3rd party applications. There was no community ‘sharing work’, there was nothing to leverage or build on ‘out there’ - there was only more things to buy, more custom development.
I’ve also spent more time than I care to admit writing applications in CFML. Coldfusion - ranks as my least favourite language - for memory hog, for crashing, for messing around with licenses. I still wonder if ‘coding with the English language’ might contain fewer characters. Another costly venture in general.
Starting in 2002 my best learning and achievements were with PHP, and under the mentorship of a Perl guru who challenged me to write less code - better. I remain incredibly grateful for the years of open source development that followed, for MySQL and the gift of Linux. With Open Source we were able to provide clients with so much more, we were able to leverage community efforts and ease the cost of development. We were able to leverage work by open communities, and yes we gave back too. I've never looked back.
It still took a few more years to recognize that ‘open’ wasn’t just about ‘free’, it was invitation to participate. This most profound, career altering realization for me came thanks to the emergence of the Mozilla Firefox browser. That a group of people could band together with a belief that users deserved a choice, and that innovation was threatened without it - was exciting and compelling. Putting people over profit ensures innovation can move forward in a sustainable way.
Watch Code Rush if you’re curious about the story of Firefox back then. My place in this history was as part of the team who developed Netscape 8 - for AOL - a browser with both IE and Firefox rendering engines as a solution to compatibility issues… Which wasn’t well received, but a place in history nonetheless ;)
It was the extended hand of the Drupal community at the Vancouver Open Web conference in 2009, that first activated me as a Drupal contributor. More specifically a talk by Angie Byron and message that ‘anyone’ can contribute, inspired me to believe that ‘anyone’ included me.
I went on to work at a University for five years. This experience opened my eyes to the importance of disrupting Higher Education. At DrupalCon Denver, I learned about 'Open Michigan', the University of Michigan's portal for sharing open resources including OERs and code. This inspired to my own work with education technologists launching Open Royal Roads. The response was incredibly positive, and proof that open education is a blossom unfolding.
Universities sharing code is *not* the norm(yet) by the way, and in some institutions entirely forbidden - for many reasons including legal entanglement and ego and a misunderstood assumption that only 'perfect' code can be shared. Through this work, I began participating in EduDU - and often deliver this talk on encouraging universities to share source code.
Now, developing solutions with ImageX seems a natural merging of my 14 years, focused on Drupal solutions for many Higher Education clients. I feel fortunate for this path that has lead me to open with an education focus - for the opportunity to mentor and be mentored and hopefully to witness even more positive changed influenced by open communities.
More Reading:
- Through the Keyhole, Contributing to Open Projects
- Open is a noun, verb, adjective and attitude
- The Battle for Open
- What can I do for Mozilla
- Drupal 8 Ladder
Image Credit ('Open Source Name Tag') opensourceway
