As a software developer, it is important to keep up with current technologies, stay in touch with fellow developers and look out for interesting projects.
Especially Open Source Software (OSS) has a lot to offer for the whole community of developers and techies, so platforms like Github and Bitbucket have become bigger and more important over the last years.
The key word is „Social Coding“, a concept in which software development is not pursued in small, isolated teams, but inside the whole community. The main aspect is to make OSS projects public very early to profit from the many suggestions, add-ons and help from the community. Also finished software projects can be put on social coding platform to distribute them to a larger audience and to allow others to build derived works upon existing software.
Github basically invented the „pull requests“, an idea where people who want to make contributions to an OSS project can simply fork the current process of the software into their own account, implement some changes, and present the changes to the maintainer of the original software. This practice encourages the maintainers to get code improvements and new features from the community without giving away the control over the project.
As we really like this idea of social coding, we created accounts on the platforms Github and Bitbucket for illucIT, too. I hope we will find some interesting projects to contribute to and we also plan to release some OSS projects there by ourselves in the future.