Open Source your learning with GitHub

Open source is an open invitation to plug into a global braintrust of brilliant people building the future. What you get out of it has a lot to do with what you put in.

Source control services like GitHub and GitLab are more than just a place to store code. They provide a living, breathing network of ideas, collaboration, and discovery. Contributing to open source is a great way to build your network, learn new things, and get paid. People get hung up on the idea that the only way to contribute to OSS is by opening pull requests or reviewing other peoples' code.

If you're not ready for that yet, that's okay! There are countless ways to contribute that shape the direction of tools you depend on. Active participation can benefit the libraries you rely on and help you get your work done.

Open source runs on participation. You don't need to submit a Pull Request to be helpful. Star the repos you like, vote on issues that matter to you. Subscribe to threads where you can add meaningful context. Maintainers often decide what to work on based on what gets the most attention. Quiet enthusiasm doesn’t move roadmaps-clicks and comments do.

Finding great open source tools is a skill, and frankly, it can be a competitive edge. You won’t always be looking for a new library, but building your own mental Rolodex of interesting tools helps when you're deep in a problem later. I run OpenAPI.Tools to share and surface great projects in for API devs, thanks to hundreds of contributors. Day to day, I find most of my favorite new things from Bluesky, YouTube deep dives, and Discord messages that start with "I made a thing."

No one cares how many green squares you have, but when it really matters, people will notice if you’re actually doing interesting work. When hiring, I take the time to brows every candidate's GitHub profile. If everything’s private, you disappear into the noise. I wrote about this in "Your Resume Sucks", but the TL;DR is: your public footprint matters. Not for the numbers, but for the narrative.

GitHub is more than source control. It’s where modern builders show their work-and shape what gets built next.

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On any given week, there's probably a half dozen repos that I've been sifting through for documentation, examples, or known bugs (as well as the occasional contribution). Here's the ones that have been on my mind this week:

• Expo - At Craftwork we use Expo with React Native to build the mobile app that our team uses. React-native has come such a long way in the past few years, thanks in no small part to the geniuses on the Expo team.
• React Native Reusables - Is a brilliant collection of reusable components for React Native, that uses tailwind (via the Nativewind library) to recreate Shad CN UI components for react-native. React Native apps can't use <div> and other HTML elements, so this library is a huge benefit for us.
• I've spent quite a bit of time usingtThe Typescript SDK for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) as research for connecting AI tools to Craftwork's business logic; I think it's safe to say that I'm squarely in the early adopted phase for this library. It's been a bit bumpy, but it's been evolving quickly.