Something like this probably has happened millions of times because it’s the very essence of Open Source collaboration… But when it happens to you directly it’s really awesome.

I write Open Source Software as a contributor for fun and profit: for fun because I like to program; for profit because I have the chance to work for an awesome company where Open Source Software is one of the values it is built upon: we use, contribute and create Open Source Software. By the way, the company is XWiki SAS and is one of the top contributors to the XWiki Open Source project.

Lately I’ve spent some time during the weekends developing little projects to play and learn some new technologies. In particular I’ve focused on Gnome Shell and its Javascript-based extension development environment.

The result are two little extensions that actually scratched a pesronal itch: Gnomodoro and Time tracker. The first is an implementation of the Pomodoro technique that helps you to stay focused on a given task; the second one is a simple tool that helps you track how much time you spend on different applications.

Now the nice story…

After committing these extensions to GitHub, I announced them on the Gnome community on Google+. Three things happened:

• People started to recognize my work by either suggesting improvements or by simply saying that what I did was cool. Which is great.

• A person who maintained a similar extension appreciated the work and asked me to join the effort. Indeed his extension is way more advanced than mine, but he had nevertheless tested and appreciated mine. Which is even greater.

• Someone in a comment said that maybe Time Tracker was lacking an icon, and it was right because I just used the “Tt” string as the icon. But he did something more… Soon after he posted a brand-new icon designed by him. And this is completely awesome!

That’s exactly what I think it’s really great about Open Source… Open Source FTW!