This website is open source

PublishedJuly 4, 2022

•2 min read

Chris Bongers

I'm a full-stack developer from South Africa 🇿🇦. I love writing about JavaScript, HTML and CSS.

When I rewrote my website in Astro, I decided to make it an open source project.

But let's dive into what this means and how you can contribute.

First of all, being open source has several meanings. This website means people can use the source code, but only while maintaining the same license. This ensures it will stay a free project forever.

Why would you open source it?

My main reason behind making the website open source is that I'm only a one-person show.

I try my best to deliver high-quality content every single day, but as I'm a mere human, I make mistakes on the way.

By making the website open source, I want to give people the option to help me improve the content on each page. Or fix bugs that you might have encountered.

This way, it becomes a product for the community, enhanced by the community. There are many great readers out there who often see little mistakes, and I would love for them to have a way to contribute.

How can someone contribute?

Let's first look at some examples of what they can contribute.

Typo's and grammar mistakes on existing pages
Outdated packages or code samples
Perhaps missing images or updating them
Provide translations (externally, upcoming)
Fix specific future ideas that are logged in issues
Create issues for problems you might have noticed

Then the main question comes down to how they can contribute.

And if you are very new to open source contributions, I suggest you read my article on contributing to open source.

However, I tried to make it as simple as possible for people.

I included an "edit on GitHub" button on every article page, so people can quickly navigate to the page on GitHub and make textual modifications to the article.

Edit on GitHub on daily-dev-tips.com website

Conclusion

I hope that open sourcing this website will improve the content and help more people find solutions to their problems.

And you can always contact me with general inquiries or issues.

Thank you for reading, and let's connect!

Thank you for reading my blog. Feel free to subscribe to my email newsletter and connect on Facebook or Twitter

#opensource #beginners #web-development #programming

Comments (1)

Join the discussion

Andrew Wooldridge3y ago

Usually open source projects present some benefit to the users as well as the author. What incentive do you give to someone who wishes to contribute to this site when the only seemingly beneficiary is yourself?

I'm not trying to facetious, just hope you can clarify that aspect as it's an essential part of the picture. Open source projects usually seek to benefit everyone who uses the project.

Chris Bongers3y ago

To me I write these articles as one single person. If they help someone, but during that help they've noticed something was outdated or had a typo the incentive is that they can make it better for other people.

So my idea is to pass on the knowledge by improving it for future readers.

Might be a bit hippie-dippie from me, but that's my vision. 😅 And ofcourse it could be their first intro into technical writing, by learning from how I do it and making small changes.

Andrew Wooldridge3y ago

Chris Bongers After visiting the site I better understand the benefit to users - kinda like a mini MDN. I just feel in the context of this article, you might want to mention that you created the site to help others learn, etc. As for someone like me who never viewed the site before might struggle to understand the benefit to themselves for contributing. Thanks for the kind response!

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