SmartBear Blog

SmartBear had a great post on this for beginners: http://blog.smartbear.com/programming/14-ways-to-contribute-to-open-so…

I wasn't aware, but BPG is a Fabrice Bellard[1] project. Bellard is possibly the best example I'm aware of the 100x programmer. [1] http://blog.smartbear.com/careers/fabrice-bellard-portrait-of-a-super-… [2] A subset of things he started: LZEXE, FFMpeg, QEMU. He's also held the record for the calculation of the largest known prime and the most digits of Pi, wrote the first x86 emulator in JS that could boot Linux, won the International Obfuscated C Contest, etc etc.

While there are the usual legal bizzarities ( http://blog.smartbear.com/apis/api-copyright-and-why-you-should-care/ ), there's no reason this should be any different than copyright of code. Design-inspired is not design infringement.

Here's a readily digestible summary of what's new in C11: http://blog.smartbear.com/codereviewer/c11-a-new-c-standard-aiming-at-…

There was an interesting article about Fabrice: http://blog.smartbear.com/careers/fabrice-bellard-portrait-of-a-super-… Does anyone know if he has a day job or does he just lock himself away and work on these interesting projects?

I wish we could move away from the awful format that is animated gif and use something much better in terms of compression, color support and frame rate. Like webm.[1][2] [1]http://blog.4chan.org/post/81896300203/webm-support-on-4chan [2]http://blog.smartbear.com/devops/gif-is-dead-long-live-webm/ [3]http://motherboard.vice.com/read/what-is-webm-and-can-it-dethrone-the-…

Direct link since page is down: http://blog.smartbear.com/wp-content/uploads/imports/poor-web-performa… http://imgur.com/QDEAPuK

Funny thing, I asked someone about this, who poked around... and discovered the Linux options are far smaller. There's _one_ option (I don't recall its name) but nothing like the choices for Mac and Windows. Lots of Android choices though: http://blog.smartbear.com/mobile/10-live-wallpapers-to-gussy-up-your-a…

Sorry about that. If you're looking for a laugh, I actually do have a few developer/QA comics that I published to the same blog a while ago: http://blog.smartbear.com/cartoons/so-i-heard-you-guys-like-software-c… http://blog.smartbear.com/mobile/5-software-cartoons-to-get-you-throug…

A nice blog post about him: http://blog.smartbear.com/software-quality/bid/167059/

Pretty much all projects can benefit from these kinds of skills. I'm a community manager and technical writer, and I make non-code contributions to open source projects. My process is something like this: 1) Find an open source thing that I use or think is interesting. This has included OpenStreetMap, LocalWiki, MediaWiki, an interactive map project at my former university, a tool my hacker/makerspace has built for itself, an educational website about open source, a tool made by the local Code for America brigade, etc. The important part is just that I like the thing. 2) Get in contact with the people - join the mailing list, IRC channel, forum, meetups, or whatever they use to communicate; look at the bug tracker and blog. Start learning about how the people work and what they're working on, and start asking and answering small questions, pretty much making friends with them in a low-key way. At this point you can probably tell whether they're reasonable people to talk to - if they're unfriendly or non-responsive, abandon ship. 3) Ask for suggestions for what to work on, and find tasks for yourself based on your expertise. Things will come up as needing improvement, and you can propose solutions to the group and start getting them done. For me, this can involve recognizing and filing bugs about user experience issues, improving website copy, writing marketing materials like social media posts and blog posts, organizing documentation, identifying holes in documentation…