When I hear “open source,” I mostly think about the idea of being open and accessible. Also, it is useful and insightful to be able to read the actual source code of the tools you use every day

Why Open Source Matters

Open source has a lot going for it. Things move faster when thousands of people can find bugs and build features together, no single company can match that. It’s also way more accessible — free tools mean students, startups, and developers everywhere can use them without worrying about expensive licenses. And if something doesn’t work exactly how you want, you can just fork it and change it yourself.

That said, it’s not all great. A lot of important projects are maintained by a few volunteers who eventually burn out, and nobody’s really figured out how to sustainably fund open source work. The UX can also be rough — sometimes it feels like tools were built by engineers for engineers. And something I’ve noticed is that when contributors come from all over the world with different coding styles and ways of communicating, things can get messy. It’s also hard to see the big picture of where a project is heading when decisions are spread across issues, mailing lists, and random PRs.

Why I’m Taking This Class

Two reasons, really. I want to contribute to real projects that people actually use and it looks better than class projects on a resume. But I also want to give back. I’ve been using open source tools heavily for my work, and it feels right to contribute instead of just consuming.

Four Open Source Projects

LangChain — I’ve been using this for about two years now for building AI agents. Watching it grow from a small project into a major framework has been cool.

vLLM — This is what I use to serve large language models on local GPUs. I have built open source project around it and impressed by the awesome community.

Linux — The classic example of open source taking over the world.

Git — Can’t leave without it after learning how to do version control. Save my life many times.