A new section of my personal website has just been opened and will hopefully see a lot of growth in the coming years: the Open Source Section. While I’ve been contributing for a while to a colleague’s open-source projects, this is my first time creating my own projects from the ground up.

I’ve described my reasons for opening this section on the home page and a few others, but it’s really important to hear. Actually, I’ve been really hesitant to make my code open source for a while now, but I realize that it’s not acceptable. After about a year of thinking about it and finding out what my problems were, I’ve decided that it’s in my best interest to break out and try it. That’s not to say that I didn’t have valid reasons to hold me back.

My first concern was credit. While I’m not terribly attached to my code, like other programmers I do feel the need to be at least partially recognized for the work I’ve put in to it. To be honest, it’s from a long line of experiences I’ve had where people have been unsupportive of hours of work or ideas that I’ve created. I’ve grown to hate the idea of someone devaluing or stealing my work. Unfortunately, this has lead me down the path to the Dark Side(see also) of proprietary ideas and opening myself to other opinions.

The fact of the matter is that I’ve benefited from other tools in my work but I’ve never credited the developers then. But there’s a reason why that’s okay. It’s not about the programmer(s)…it’s about the code. While every programmer wants to make a life out of this, it’s not appropriate to take every little action and demand credit for it. If I write something pretty nice, which isn’t quite likely, maybe someone will use it and tell a friend about it: “this is pretty nice“. If I need credit, I can my potential employer “I did this” or “I contributed to this”. But notice that the pride is in the finished product and you can enjoy your work on it…not on the casual afternoon of programming that you have the urge to brag about. I’ve been guilty of this a thousand times over.

The other issue is code quality. While I like to think of myself as a pretty solid programmer, I’m definitely not comfortable with showing my code off to the world. Actually, my first project, Droplet, saw a complete redesign the day before I put it online because I was worried about what my peers might think of my half-decent code. After reading Jeff Atwood’s post on programmers who fear outside eyes, I realized that I was part of my own problem and that this was a good way to break out of that.

In any case, I hope that you check out the open source website and try out Droplet. I really have enjoyed using the software and I hope you do the same. It’s not pretty, and it’s not a money-maker…but it’s a nice tool that you can share with everyone. Please share your comments and suggestions, and write a few lines of code yourself…I’m still waiting on my first user-submitted patch!

If Droplet isn’t your cup of tea, I have a few more on the way including a couple PHP classes and a fun few items in Java.