Going from Closed-Source to Open-Source Part 1: Django Unchained

Dan Hamilton
1 min readJun 9, 2023

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I’ve been a Python developer for 10 years now and despite using mostly open-sourced code, I have never contributed to any open-source project. I am currently working contract jobs and seeking employment (Coming soon finally: My LinkedIn) so I decided that in some of my spare time to should go back and contribute to the projects that I use and love. In doing so I’ll document the journey to show how easy or hard it is for other developers to follow. The first project I will contribute to as I’ve worked for 7 years on it is Django. Here is more information.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/internals/contributing/

Today’s steps:

Sign up for the Django Forum — my username is @danhamilt: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/internals/contributing/writing-code/

Django mailing lists:

I am currently exploring where to go. This is part 1. I’ll begin going through the issues and reading the style guidelines here: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/internals/contributing/writing-code/

But every developer should contribute to open source. I imagine most developers are using django-rest-framework for all their projects now so I’ll hop over after. As I add more parts to this journey I’ll link them through.

Anyways, on this Friday morning: Cheers to everyone who has contributed before me to an open source project.

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