front matter
A mentor of mine once told me, at the beginning of my tech career, “If there’s one thing you can do to better your career, it’s contributing to open source.” I’d harbored that thought in the back of my mind throughout the years but never had a reason to do so. I thought, “What could I build that would be useful for others?” While working at 1904labs I developed the ECO API for (at the time) Twitter Heron. It came from a client’s need—and from a little bit of selfishness; I really wanted to write and contribute that code. Eventually, Twitter donated Heron to the Apache Foundation, and I was invited to be a committer and part of the project management committee for Heron. The project interested me because it was the first open source project I did a deep dive on.