Open Source Projects and Contributions

Source: AJB Blog — https://blog.ajb.bz/open-source-projects-and-contributions-20-years-of-software
Author: Alan Bollinger
Published: Nov 1, 2012
Rights: © 2012 AJB Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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My involvement in open source began in the early 2000s. For more than two decades, I have built, maintained, contributed to, and supported software shared with the developer community.

That work spans PHP frameworks, developer tools, content management systems, ticketing platforms, UI libraries, workflow engines, and modern self-hosted applications. Some projects started as small utilities. Others grew into substantial applications and frameworks. Together, they represent a long-running commitment to building software in the open and contributing back to the ecosystem I rely on.

You can find my current open source work on GitHub.

Projects I've Built

These are projects I have developed and released as open source:

Open Source Contributions

Beyond projects I created myself, I have contributed to a range of open source repositories across the PHP, Laravel, Kohana, and developer tooling ecosystems.

Kohana and PHP

Laravel and Web Development

ProcessMaker

My open source contributions also extend into the ProcessMaker ecosystem, where I contributed to multiple repositories behind the ProcessMaker platform:

My GitHub contribution history includes additional repositories beyond those listed above, reflecting work across multiple projects and ecosystems over the years.

Lessons Learned

After more than two decades of building and contributing to open source, a few principles have consistently held up.

Build for the person who has to maintain it. Clever code has a short shelf life. Clear code, sensible abstractions, and predictable behavior make software useful long after the original author has moved on.

Solve real problems. The projects that have lasted have generally started with a practical need. Open source is most valuable when the software is useful enough that someone else actually wants to run it, modify it, or build on it.

Make the boundary between the project and the user obvious. Good documentation, straightforward configuration, and reasonable defaults matter as much as the implementation. A technically excellent project that is difficult to understand is still difficult software.

Stay curious. The tools have changed dramatically over the past twenty years, from SourceForge and early PHP applications to GitHub, modern frameworks, cloud infrastructure, Rust, Go, and AI-assisted development. The underlying discipline has not changed: learn the technology, understand the problem, and build something useful.

Most importantly, open source has taught me that software is never finished when the author stops writing code. It becomes useful when other people can understand it, run it, change it, and make it their own.

A Long-Term Commitment

Open source has been a consistent part of my career rather than a recent addition to it. From early SourceForge projects to modern GitHub projects built with Laravel, Vue, Go, Rust, and TypeScript, I have continued to build software publicly, contribute to projects created by others, and participate in the communities around the tools I use.

More than twenty years later, I am still doing the same thing: building software, solving problems, and sharing the results.