Let's improve our tools
This article was originally posted at Manatí
As a company that develops sites mainly in Drupal, we had long felt that it is our duty to encourage contributions to Open Source projects, since it's for Free Software that we exist as a web agency.
During last Drupal Camp Costa Rica, Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire spoke about this. He encouraged the companies to include open source contributions in their daily work. Among the reasons he gave in this session were:
- Invest in the tools you use
- Happiness and talent retention
- Reduce the technical debt
- Start every project with better code
We couldn't agree more with those reasons, because we believe that a great team as ours is motivated by new challenges, and so, with each dose of learning obtained, we can improve technically and make the tools better. Other very important reason that we could add to the afore mentioned is feeling part of the tools we use and the community around them through our contribution.
That is why last Thursday, at Manatí we had our first contributions afternoon. The idea was to generate a space where we could all help each other to collaborate to different Open Source projects that we work with or that we like; besides, it was an opportunity for the Manateam to meet again (every day we are more in the #remoteTeam and this was a perfect chance to be together as a team).
In this way, we managed to overcome some of the roadblocks that are found when people try to contribute, such as the lack of time (we had a space of four hours for this) and the lack of knowledge (we helped each other to achieve the objective).
Thus, from this time we managed to generate these contributions:
- Translations for Views
- Translations for Panels Everywhere
- Translations for Drupal 8 core
- Translations for Migrate
- Translations for Features
- Translations moderation (Andrés Díaz Soto remembered he is a spanish translations moderator)
- Two patches to Facebook Instant Articles module.
- Pull Request for dwcramer.ansible ansible role.
- Pull Request for wtanaka.virtualbox ansible role.
- Pull Request for gvillalta99.nvm ansible role.
- Pull Request for altermn.rvm ansible role.
- We started to install dependencies to run wraith inside the virtual machines created with our MDSK generator.
The general feeling in the team at the end of the afternoon was of satisfaction; because we felt that we were able to contribute a lot and we are very motivated to turn this into a recurring activity and to continue contributing to the projects that we use daily.
"Now I really want to contribute"
At the end of the afternoon, Dharizza said "Now I really want to contribute"; and we know firsthand that it's the feeling of the whole team, and we look forward to repeating this soon; because, besides contributing, it's also a wonderful opportunity to meet as a team and have a little of Team Building. We want to encourage anyone who has the chance to contribute to the projects used everyday; there are many reasons and so much satisfaction gained from this process.