It’s about 8 months since my first contribution to an open source project. It was followed up minutes later by one to reverse all the accidental formatting changes I made. Damn you Visual Studio!

I am happy to say that it was not an isolated contribution though.

Now I am by no means a prolific contributor and my spare time is more often spent tinkering with my own ideas and projects rather than working hard on open source. However, there has been a steady enough flow of pull requests and projects to keep me satisfied that I am at least involved.

RavenDb and Nancy are where most of my focus has been. Two great examples of modern C# open source development.

In my own right there have been RavenDb plugins for Glimpse and MvcMiniProfiler.

Straying from C# there is even a start being made on a Node.js client for RavenDb. Getting started with Node has been an absolute blast, and my first serious attempt at adding a new language to my skill set since C#. Sure I’ve dabbled with jQuery heavy javascript in the past to add a little life to a web page, but truly learning the object model and scoping rules of javascript is a different beast entirely.

Most recently, as in last week, I have been pitching in at Code52, a new idea for this year which tackles a new project every week. It has been very .NET focussed so far, but that is simply a product of the founding core of developers having .NET backgrounds. At the end of the day, the people who are in the chat room at the start of each project are the ones who decide the technology stack. I hope to get them doing a Node project at some point this year.

The project from last week was IdeaStrike a UserVoice inspired (clone?) site that you can simply deploy to AppHarbor and manage yourself to track ideas and gather feedback about your product. You can see it in action at http://ideastrike.apphb.com/.

It uses Nancy and Entity Framework. I wouldn’t call it a best practice example of either at the moment, it is tough to refactor a project that goes from start to finish in a week. It is however a good example of a non-trivial application, with (some) tests, in Nancy.

Even though the week is up, the project does not stop there. People are always welcome to fork, change, commit and send through a pull request.

A full list of previous projects, that will update over the year, can be found at http://code52.org/projects.html.

This week the focus is a cross-platform multiplayer game. Much further out of my comfort zone, but a great chance to learn some XNA, and eventually Android and iOS when those clients are added.

Now this is a fairly reflective post, not my usual style, but the point is really just to spread the word. There are lots of interesting projects around, big and small, in almost any language you care to use. Just pick one and jump in.