My very first contribution to open source

Open source has defined my career so profoundly that I cannot even begin to be thankful for it.  I have learned so much from so many great people in open source.  I have supported and grown my family thanks to my income from working with open source technologies.

Over the years I've gone from a php developer to becoming python, aws cloud infrastructure architect and everything in between.  I have learned what it takes to handle thousands of requests per second to 100's of thousands of requests per second.  I have learned how to architect, rebuild rework legacy code to work in cloud native environments.

I have been through my fare share of challenges too.  I have been through properties that were hacked.  I have been through legacy systems that we had to scaffold to support because that's where majority of our customers were.  I have had to change the architecture of current system in order to be able to to continue to support our long term customers.

I have also been privileged to be building team for new systems and have had the opportunity to learn and architect systems for the cloud.

I am very proud to say however, that I have finally done one thing I've never been able to do due to my time.  It's to contribute to an actual project.  Amazing news is, yesterday one of my contributions were merged in.

My first contribution pull request.
https://github.com/ckan/ckan/pull/5020

I am so thankful for my current Employer MaRS Discovery District (https://marsdd.com) for the opportunity to work there and providing me with this opportunity.  I am also so thankful for all my past employers, especially Nextopia Software Corporation and Thanedirect Canada for the opportunities that led to this.

I have heard the call for "Never give up, never surrender"  I'm more partial to "persistence always pays off, if it doesn't then you aren't being persistent enough."

Until next time folks, Cheers.

Shameer.


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