Open source technology and communities have provided me with some unexpected and interesting benefits. Here I discussed some of these unconventional uses of open source that helped me in different ways:
Discovering Cool Tools / Projects:
The Text-to-Handwriting tool:
I found it from my friend's GitHub stars list. During the pandemic, we had to write assignments in a notebook and send them to the professor by clicking pictures and creating a PDF version of it. this tool saved a lot of my time, I used to just copy and paste the text from google and this tool just convert all the text into handwritten notes. it really looks like it is handwritten and you can draw stuff on the pages too.My cousin gave me an apple music subscription, I always was a Spotify user but when I shifted to Apple Music, It was a highly time-consuming task to re-create those playlists on apple music.
He gave me a link to the GitHub repository named Playlistor. it cloned all my playlists from Spotify to Apple music. This open-source tool saved a lot of my time and effort.I make music and I use FL Studio. I was watching a tutorial and noticed his FL looks different. I googled "FL Studio Themes" and a GitHub repo came up. It had all the skins in a single repo. my friends were asking how I made this weird looking software look so cool.
Open source always pushed me to learn and create more!
My friend once sent me a link to the discord nitro codes generator GitHub Repository. It was a CLI tool and when I shared it with other people, they thought it was a virus because it looked boring, had no UI and looked shady.
Then I decided to make a web version of it with a beautiful gradient design,
And I learned more about javascript by building that little project.Once I saw a repository of discord image exploits on GitHub, then I decided to dig more into it but ended up discovering a bunch of text exploits of discord. then I created a list of all the discord text exploits I discovered and pushed it on GitHub. It is one of my most starred repo now.
Communication skills and networking:
Teaching open source to my friends improved my teaching skills. My friend was learning web development, I told him to make his creations available to the public by making them open source on GitHub, and he ask me to teach him the basics of open source. so that was my first time explaining and teaching someone about GitHub and open-source contribution. I introduced him to vercel as well.
I found a lot of cool people and open-source projects through Twitter and the following list of other cool people on GitHub.
I found siddhant khare through GitHub and later found that he was from my college. He also taught me a lot of stuff about open source.
I discussed more stories about how I made friends through tech and open-source communities blog post.
More:
Sometimes I use GitHub as a cloud storage for things other than code, like google drive. one of my friend started using GitHub for backing up some of his files but eventually got into open-source projects.
Markdowns: I saw a lot of GitHub profiles and noticed how creative they are with their README.md file.
I learned more about the markdown syntax to beautify my profile and learning that earlier helped me create good documentation for the projects.
Markdowns are a great way to get started with non-code open-source contributions.
I write all the blog posts on my website in markdown format too, it feels much faster and easier.
Thanks for Reading :)