Scratch that itch!

You know what is the best thing about open source? that you can scratch your itches. What it means? it means that if you encounter some ordeal in you daily trench developer's war, you can fix it.

In the dev world we call it 'itch'. for example, you can find the perfect module, component or plugin to your system. When you see it on GitHub, it is like a love at first sight. You heart pace quickens, Anything in your cube begin to shine and the world looks great again, But after some usage, almost all developer sometime says - "But only if...", but only if this module had this feature, but only if this bug was fixed. Thus "but only.." feeling called 'itch'.

Some itches can be ignored, but in the open source world you can actually scratch the itch! It means contribute code and make the product, module or plugin a little bit better. To eliminate the pain, or the itch, is quite easy. Just clone and create a pull request.

Let me tell you about one of my itches. In one of my projects I wanted a node.js module that find the last commit information on a git repository. I did find almost-perfect-module: git-last-commit. It was almost perfect, with single line I could fetch all the information I wanted about the last commit. The problem was that I really wanted to point the module to any repository out there.

If we were living in a close source environment, I wouldn't had a choice but to live with that. But in the open source world I can scratch my itch and that's exactly what I did. I've opened a pull request on the git-last-commit GitHub project repository.

And guess what? the repository owner approved my pull request. Since this module was backed by strong automatic tests, The owner could see easily that none of the existing functionality broke because of my change. I also added one automatic test for my added functionality. After his approval, The new code was pushed to GitHub and to NPM (node.js module repository) and I could had used the new functionality along with the rest of the module's users.

So my itch was scratched, and it was wonderful feeling. Not only that I now enjoy a better functionality, EVERYONE in the world that use this module can use it.

itches cannot be avoidable in the modern dev world, but I feel lucky enough to be able to scratch those. If you are a developer - scratch that itch! :)