Open Giving: My Efforts to Improve

Open Giving is an open source application I've been helping out with that started at the Iowa Code Camp. It's aim is to serve Habitat for Humanity in managing how they track and allocate resources for home builds. This is my first open source project I've worked on and my experience with working on an actual dev team is extremely limited. So far it's been a big learning experience because I can't just do everything the way i want to do it.

Most of my career I've worked on small enough projects that I was the only dev which has afforded me the luxury of not having to explain why i code the way i do (read: Cowboy Coder). My saving grace has been that I value best practices and try to do things the best way possible. That being said, playing a role on the team is more difficult than being the team. Even though Open Giving is open source software and I can't get fired per se, I still want to try to conform to what the team needs. For example, in the app we're using master pages, linq to sql, an app_code and app_data directories... I think there are even some declarative data sources in there. I typically wouldn't use any of these technologies for various reasons but the rest of the team wanted to... so I've been trying to adapt. Even though I wouldn't choose these technologies I can't help but feel like I'm becoming a better coder because I'm learning them more in depth and because I'm working outside of my comfort zone of control.

My point in all this that i would encourage any developer, especially a silo'd ones, to get involved in an open source project if not to learn a technology, to learn to work with the team in mind.