I'm a software developer with 40 years' professional experience, lucky enough to be considering early retirement. I love writing code and don't want to stop. I'm keen to give something back and contribute to one or more open source projects.
The questions are, to what shall I contribute, and how do I get started?
My skills are mainly C++, having spent much of the past decade programmatically dismantling and reassembling Microsoft Office files. I'm quite happy to learn Rust or Go, but don't really like webby front-endy ux stuff.
Any suggestions for a worthy project to which I could contribute? Please boost if you can.
#SoftwareEngineering #SoftwareDevelopment #SoftwareDev #OpenSource #FreeSoftware
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@dave
Have you looked into LibreOffice?
Wow! I wasn't expecting such a lot of responses, and I certainly wasn't expecting such a lot of great suggestions. Thank you!
Interestingly, I have done about 10 years of Java in the past, and as part of my day job I have also dismantled and reassembled the LibreOffice ODF formats programmatically (very similar to, only more sensible than, Microsoft Office OPC). I've been using LibreOffice going all the way back to when it was Star Office, before it was acquired by Sun Microsystems and ultimately open sourced. I probably owe the project some free labour, and it looks like a good fit.
I will, however, check out the other suggestions too. I've been using Linux for my home desktop on and off for 20 years (currently "on", and using MX Linux with KDE), so maybe contributing to KDE might be a good option as well.
Fortunately things have moved on since I started my career, when you did software development using vi (non-improved), SCCS, and if you were very advanced, emacs. I've been using git for quite a while, albeit with (excuse me while I swear) Visual Studio and Azure DevOps, so I should be OK working in the predominantly git-based opensource world.
Thanks again for your brilliant responses.
@dave a Java library to reaf and write documents still not exists. Odftoolkit sucks, has performance issues, I had to make so many quirks, cide is ugly (had to cast eandom stings...)