So, it appears that I’ve been under the false assumption that my only way to contribute to a large project, regardless of corporate or open source, was through straight programming.  How fortunate I am that I’ve been wrong.

I’ve never considered myself an ‘ace programmer’ by any means, and I have more than one not so fond memories of staring at pages of code wondering why it won’t work.  This has lead to a more favored past time of coding, debugging.  Generating code for me is often slow, and tedious.  While the pseudo-code can flow easily, actual implementation takes a bit more work and requires even more headaches.  But, once I get the general code going, debugging it for errors and making it run a bit more efficient seems to be something I can do, rather easily; especially when its belongs to someone else.  Perhaps that is what I should be setting my sights on, improving how well I can debug code, as it appears to be just another valuable facet of coding.

In a somewhat related event, the class I am working with on the OpenMRS project has been introduce to yet another invaluable tool, IRC chat.  Nothing can help you become familiar with a new program then spending a couple hours straight working with it and communicating with your peers.  Reminds me a little bit of MSN messenger or AOL back in my youth, but now with actual purpose.

From the blog aboulais » CS WSU by aboulais and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Well then, the OpenMRS is certainly a very large and interesting project to say the least.  But with such a large and ongoing effort to provide an Open Source EMR database one is immediately struck with the question.  “What could (what I consider) a novice programmer possibly contribute to such a large ongoing effort?”  The upcoming few months will certainly answer that question without doubt.  As for the time being, I am very excited to be working (soon) be working and contributing to the OpenMRS community.

My expectations of this course are already set quite high, with the hopes of simply becoming a much more savvy programmer.  My only regeret is not being introduced to such sources as GitHub and exposure to other open source projects sooner, but that cannot be helped at this point in time. On that topic, over the Eric S. Raymond’s article The Cathedral and the Bazaar have also opened me up to the raw potential  — and how powerful open source communities can be.  Maybe my current inexperience will still be of good use to the OpenMRS project after all.

From the blog aboulais » CS WSU by aboulais and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.