Becoming an Open Source Savant with Many Interesting Friends: I

Anybody who has read any of my blogs knows one thing for sure. I love a wee series. Why have one blog post, when you could have four? Well, ladies and gentlemen, this is the motherload.

I've always been enamoured with the idea of contributing to open source projects - and I've done some work adjacent to that, building publicly available R and Python packages - but there's something about being part of that elite class of developer. The folks working with an open source team? Those folks are the creme de la creme. They can understand the inner workings of any processor using only 1s, 0s, and a coffee machine.

Or at least that's how I perceive them.

I've been lucky enough to work with a few of those people who are playing technical chess, while I've been trying to learn behind them with my checkers pieces, but as time passes I honestly find myself being the person who technically best-equipped to deal with issues - especially where data workloads are concerned. There's a whole bunch of adages about being in the wrong room waiting around for me here, but I don't think a change professionally is the right approach for technical growth. In a professional sense, given my position is as a Principal Consultant, my next move is hopefully towards a more strategic role - Head Of, Director Of, etc - so this one has to come from outside the realm of employment.

One answer is the one you're looking at now. Developing my own applications and solutions (like this website and blog). The other obvious answer?

Become an open source contributor.

Now, there's a few different approaches to be taken here. I've already worked on R packages before, so perhaps some open source R (like the tidyverse repo shown above) or Python could be a great step. I've also got a vested interest in Spark (like in the Apache Spark repo shown below), although the technical overhead on that would be significantly higher. So the first step will be reading, learning, and understanding that estate, before coming back with a clear plan on where and how I'm going to spend my time supporting.

As I do this, I'm going to aim to post at the end of each month (next post end of February 2026), with updates on progress and my experiences. So, this isn't quite a series, rather an ongoing, everlasting diatribe, for your own personal enjoyment. Or more likely, my own personal enjoyment.

Let's see how this goes!