When Startups Go Open Source and Merge Your Code
Known for his open source and JavaScript security initiatives, Liran Tal is an award-winning software developer, security researcher, and open source champion in the JavaScript community. He's an internationally recognized GitHub Star, acknowledged for his open source advocacy, and has received the OpenJS Foundation's Pathfinder for Security for his work on Node.js security. His contributions to developer security education include leading OWASP projects, building supply chain security tools, participation in CNCF and OpenSSF initiatives, and authoring books such as O'Reilly's Serverless Security. He leads the developer advocacy team at Snyk.io and is on a mission to empower developers with better application security skills.
Dec 29, 2016 ~ 2 min read
When Startups Go Open Source and Merge Your Code
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This Open Source thing is the real deal.
I have previously written about how easily you can contribute to other open source projects, but contributing code to startups and help them succeed?
Well yes, that too.
One of the tech newsletters I’m subscribed to mentioned scanr, a young OCR as a Service startup that gives you an API to send pictures to and get back text.
Well doesn’t that sound like an interesting hack for the weekend? Sure does!
Curious as I am, taking a dive in their documentation shows they are very tightly built on open source solutions, and further sniffing around reveals they also share much of this as open source, including their programming SDK bundles, on Github. Where else?
Being me, I just had to take a look at their Node.js module. It’s quite simple, but examining the code immediately shows some issues. Minor stuff, but left un-attended. Fixing it up is so trivial and simple, so why not? why not?
There goes that Pull-Request thing which magically merges my fixes with that repository:
Contribution is warmly appreciated and merged.
Another good thing we did for the world, and for another person.
Goodluck scanR!
Share with me! What repositories and projects did you contribute to recently?
I’m genuinely interested to know what you’re working on.
