Something I wanted to get under my belt this year was to take on a significant role in an open source project. I’ve built a major part of my career around the results of open source work: I am a PHP programmer and I rarely work in any other environment other than Linux, and it would be nice to be able to give something back to that community that has helped put food on my table.

There are a lot of options out there. Drupal seemed like a natural fit for me, as I’ve spent a significant part of the last several months honing my Drupal skills. But what I really want to do is build my experience in another programming language while working on an open source project.

Another goal I had this year was to build an expertise in Objective-C, but Objective-C open source projects are hard to find. I’m also interested in building on my Ruby skills and my Python skills, but Ruby over Python.

So with these requirements, I’m going to spend time looking for a Ruby open source project that I’ll be able to join in on.

There are a couple of other pieces to this undertaking for me, though. The first is to get a feel for the open source community. Frankly, I don’t know it as well as I would like. I know how I do code reviews in my own work, and I also know what it means to commit to a project in my own mind, but I want to get a better understanding of how it works in a community open source project, as it will likely be rather different than what I’m used to.

The other piece is where to find a project that will suit my interests. I plan on starting my search in GitHub, but I haven’t ruled out Sourceforge. Regardless, when I find something I’ll mention my work on it here. Frankly, I haven’t given up on the idea of working on a Drupal module either. But if anyone knows of an interesting project that wouldn’t mind having a slightly better than novice Ruby programmer who is interested in starting small with some doing some bug fixes, let me know.

More on this soon, I hope. And I apologize in advance if I decide to use this forum to point to interesting potential projects.