Giving back to the community

At Stack Builders, we are constantly looking for ways to improve ourselves as software developers. We have weekly R&D talks where alternating members of our team present about topics that are relevant to us. We have had very interesting discussions around topics like SOLID principles, testing, design patterns and, recently, we have focused on functional programming.

Most of the content of our R&D talks comes from blogs, podcasts and open source projects which knowledgeable people in the software development community create for everyone to use. We use open source libraries in our projects all the time. We have benefited a lot from the community and this got us thinking about what we are giving back to it.

That's why we have been contributing to open source projects and even created a couple of them ourselves. Some of us have participated in conferences like GoRuCo and EuRuKo and local meetups, like the Bogota Ruby Meetup. We have also hosted hackathons and sponsored events.

Giving back to the community has been a great experience. It’s rewarding and it’s also a way of forcing ourselves to do our best by presenting and writing great code for open source projects.

We encourage you to do the same. Pick a topic you really like and prepare a presentation about it; you’ll see how that forces you to study and think hard about the topic, since explaining it clearly to others is no simple feat. Find a bug or a missing feature in an open source project and submit a pull request. You will enjoy giving back to the community as much as we do!