If you take a look at the title of this post and instantly think it’s a trap or bait – let me prove you wrong. This is not going to be one of these catchy titles, so “what kind of bs am I going to read here” has little use in this place. Actually, this is 100% true that contributing to the open source community might greatly affect your life – and it goes far beyond daily activities related to the coding. Therefore, let me tell you a short story about a guy, typical .NET developer, who not so long ago also thought that being an open source developer literally means wasting your time.

The genesis

Everything started 4 months ago. It was beginning of the March and I’ve decided to participate in the sort of programming & blogging competition named Daj Się Poznać (Get To Know). There were 2 main requirements – develop an open source project using GitHub repository and write at least 2 posts per week for next 10 consecutive weeks. Eventually, I’ve won the overall competition – you can read my summary and another article about feelings after winning the finals. Yet, it’s not the main point here – what I’ve realized within just a few weeks since I’ve started working on my open source project called Warden was that I really enjoyed doing this and back then I was already sure that this is something that I’ll keep on developing for a long, long time.

Source: Open source is a life changer | Piotr Gankiewicz