My conversation on Chatzilla

<saadhusain>    hey michael <michaelhanson>    hello <michaelhanson>    ah! You're at Seneca? <saadhusain>    yes <michaelhanson>    Excellent. Sorry, had to contextualize for a moment there. <michaelhanson>    To answer you, no, I've been using and contributing to open source for about 18 years now. I did recently spend a couple years inside a big company (following an acquisition) and missed out on a couple years of version-control progress, which was unfortunate. <michaelhanson>    So I'm a bit of a newbie where git is concerned, for example, which means some of my methodologies are rusty. <saadhusain>    that's understandable <saadhusain>    furthermore, I would like to know about what projects are you involved with in the open source community, if you don't mind me asking <michaelhanson>    sure... once upon a time, I was reasonably active in the libxml and libcurl library world. not for quite some years now. <michaelhanson>    my main focus for the last year has been on Mozilla Labs projects, where I have worked on Sync (I wrote the unit testing framework and implemented many of the tests), Contacts (I was the lead developer; hg.mozilla.org/labs/people) and some new projects that haven't made it out the door yet. <saadhusain>    i see, any advice for a noobie like me as to how i could contribute to the open source other than the project work we will be conducting shortly for our class? <michaelhanson>    in my experience, the best way to get involved with open source is to be passionate about an application, and to learn how to use existing technology to make that application. <michaelhanson>    then let your passion steer you -- if it means you end up making a library, do that. if you end up fixing bugs in somebody else's work do that. <michaelhanson>    you may even find that you really like improving the quality of an existing application or library, and write tests and documentation for it. <saadhusain>    hopefully i'll get to see my part to the opensource community take effect as well <michaelhanson>    good luck. :) <saadhusain>    thank you michael and thank you for your time