Is it useful?

When I hear “open source,” the first thing that comes to mind is transparency. I think of Twitter or now X open-sourcing parts of their recommendation algorithms, and I think of the need for LLMs to be open-sourced. Of course, the term “open source” has a much broader scope and has uses other than transparency. To me, the greatest benefit comes in the form of saved time. Rather than reinventing the wheel everytime I want an extra feature in a project, I can reuse others’ code. However, I do get annoyed when developers suddenly stop maintaining and patching vulnerabilities in an open-source project that I’m using.

Open Source Projects I use

1. Python is the open source project I use most. It reads like English and helps me focus on the actual problems at hand rather than low-level details.

2. React is another that comes to mind, and it’s my first choice for building a front-end. It’s easy to use and helps launch a website quickly.

3. Git is another obvious choice. I use it for every group project I work on and even on large personal projects.

4. I also use Linux pretty frequently. In my Operating Systems class, we focused quite a bit on shell scripting, and it turns out to be quite powerful.