You don't need to be a 10x Ninja Rockstar to contribute to Open Source

Meeting from 7pm for a 7:30pm

We'll be upstairs in the meeting room on the first floor.

Our sponsor, local digital agency Studio 24 (http://www.studio24.net/who/join-us/), is providing free drinks. So head upstairs to find out how to get a drink and grab a beer/drink of your choice from the bar.

We also have a free copy of PHPStorm to give away, courtesy of our sponsor JetBrains (https://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/).

You don't need to be a 10x Ninja Rockstar to contribute to Open Source

Many developers assume that you need to be a great code ninja to contribute to open source projects, but that isn't the case. The people who develop those open source tools, libraries and frameworks that we use for our own work aren't all uberhackers; but are often simply individuals or small groups of volunteers, working on the projects in their own time, and who need all the help they can get.

And many companies believe that contributing to open source has no benefits, or even that it's giving away their trade secrets; but there are benefits for companies that do make contributions to Open Source projects, and it doesn't result in giving away a competitive edge, but may even result in improving their business where it matters to them - on the bottom line. So why should you or your company bother to participate in an open source project? How do you contribute your code if you want to do so? And even if you don't believe that you can contribute code, there are plenty of other ways that you can help a community to improve their project that are just as valuable.

Speaker

Our speaker Mark Baker (@Mark_Baker (https://twitter.com/Mark_Baker)) is Head of Design and Development at Innoved (Innovative Solutions for Education) Learning, based in Wigan; a company which (coincidentally) shares offices with his favourite Rugby League team, the 2013 Superleague and Challenge Cup winners, and which occasionally gets him free tickets to attend Warriors games.

He has been working in the computer software industry since before symbolics.com was registered as a domain name, before the term "cyberspace" was first used in fiction, when Linus Torvalds and Rasmus Lerdorf were still at high school, and Mrs. Zuckerberg had yet to give birth to a bouncing baby social network enabler; and has been developing for the Web in a variety of languages since the days when the Tim Berners-Lee's creation comprised less than 1,000 sites.

Over those years, he has contributed to a number of open source projects: some still extant, others lost to history, including a minor submission to PHP's SPL. Currently he is coordinator and lead developer for the PHPExcel library, and a coordinator and developer on the PHPOffice library suite (PHPWord, PHPPowerPoint, PHPProject and PHPVisio). Most recently, he has been working on new datastructures such as Tries, Quadtrees and Matrices; hoping that he'll eventually be able to get them included in SPL.

His particular interests include PHP integration with office suites, Generators, Datastructures, Textual analysis, Geodata and geographic information systems, and "big data" and data analysis.