When you contribute code to collaborative projects, whether they are open source community projects or large internal projects inside organisations, t

The secret to making code contributions that stand the test of time

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2022-07-05 19:00:10

When you contribute code to collaborative projects, whether they are open source community projects or large internal projects inside organisations, the feeling of having your code running inside a large application can be very rewarding.

I spend a lot of my time contributing code to Dask which is used by many folks around the world. It is exciting knowing that code I’ve written in Dask is being run on supercomputers at NASA and powers popular services like recommendations at Spotify.

The other side of this feeling is a strange one. Code gets replaced and improved over time, especially in active community projects, and that’s a good thing. But it means that if I stopped contributing code now the number of lines of my code that run in cool places will dwindle and eventually drop back to zero.

I’ve definitely reached the stage in my career where I want there to be less of my code in the world and I get excited when I see my code replaced with more optimal, readable, maintainable contributions. But there is also a sadness to seeing my code being removed.

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