Meet an Open Source Contributor: Chris Wininger

What was the first open source contribution you ever made?

“I have published lots of small open source projects, but most have never achieved popularity. The first widely used project I can remember contributing to was a testing framework. I believe it was the NodeJS selenium SDK. I made a performance enhancement to the way JavaScript was sent to the browser under orchestration.  

I deleted more code than I added. Someone had prematurely decided to minimize the code before sending it thinking that would speed things up but, in reality this feature is generally used with tiny scripts and the process of minimization was creating a bottleneck. I recall being pretty nervous, assuming that whoever wrote this code would be attached to it, but they agreed immediately that it had been a misstep and accepted my path fairly quickly.”

What was your journey to becoming an open source contributor?

“I have been interested in Open Source since first seeing the Red Hat CDs at the local shopping mall back in the 90s. I’ve been running Linux as my main desktop operating system since around 2010. I consume a lot of open source software. At first I was interested in the ideals and philosophy. I liked the idea of building a shared infrastructure that I could probe, understand and give back to. Also in college I liked anything that was free as in beer 🙂

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I’ve continued to use open source software less for the freedoms and “freeness”, but simply because it’s often the best tool for the job. I’m now much more of a pragmatist. I reach for the tool best suited for the job. Often the tools that work best for me are open source. Some of this may be the weight of familiarity but I think (Read more...)