Contributing To Open Source: What’s In It For Me?

Deepa Karnad Dhurka, Sr. Software Engineer, PayPal

Stevenson Hall 1300
12:00 PM - 12:50 PM

Open source software has come a long way. Commercial products like server operating systems are built around open source projects and in the least, the Linux kernel. Commercial infrastructure and software deployments - notably in Cloud - are run on a mind boggling number of open source projects. Every single day new projects are announced or released. What does this mean for the software developer? What are the opportunities and how can an engineer leverage them to distinguish and catapult her or his career? Consumed by these questions, I led a CodeChix team of women engineers into an adventure to explore this space. In June 2013, we started work on a software library written entirely in C, for SDN network connectivity. In Nov 2013, CodeChix released OFconnect as open source:https://github.com/CodeChix-OpenSource/OFconnect. In this talk, I will share the story of this CodeChix project, including a technical dive into the design and the opportunities that unfolded after its release. With this, I hope to showcase the power of affinity groups, the importance of ‘making’ and most importantly, the value in contributing to open source.