September 2019 Summaries

Anand Chowdhary, creator of Oswald Labs—the world's first end-to-end web accessibility solution, shares his journey and insights on open source contributions. He discusses how he came up with the idea for Oswald Labs after realizing the lack of website accessibility in general. Anand emphasizes the role of open-source development in making technology more inclusive and accessible, as it encourages a healthy community of developers building tools that solve problems. He also shares his advice to developers who are 'on the fence' about contributing to open source, suggesting they jump in head first without worrying too much. Anand believes that understanding the power of getting information from books, podcasts, and other sources is crucial for personal growth and learning.

Yan Zhu, creator of Spectre.css, a lightweight and modern CSS framework, shares his open source journey in this edition of Spotlight. Yan began sharing code with the open source community in 2014, which helped him learn faster. He managed to keep Spectre lightweight by using Atomic Design methodology and implementing New Web standards. Yan advises aspiring developers to give their products features that stand out and make good use of their advantages and experience. His favorite development tools include Visual Studio Code and Chrome/Chromium, while he relies on open source projects like WordPress and NPM/Yarn for his work. Yan encourages developers to start small with open source contributions and maintain momentum by continuously improving their projects.