December, 6, 2006 archives
being known for being you
mike kruckenberg shared his observations from watching mysql source code commits, and jay pipes commented about this commit from antony curtis which had him excited. now that’s how open source is supposed to work, at least in part.
i replied to a later version of that commit to our internal developer list (and antony), pointing out that with just a little effort the comment would be more useful to people outside of the development team. “plugin server variables” doesn’t really do it justice, and “WL 2936” is useful to people who can access our internal task tracking tool, but does no good to people like mike.
the other reason it is good to engage the community like this is because it is very healthy for your own future. being able to point to the work i had done on open source and the networking that came from that have both been key factors in getting jobs for me. i’m sure it will be useful next time i am looking, too.