This post recaps a webinar originally presented during the 24 hours of PASS marathon in September 2019, “The Open Source Opportunity: How You Can Impact Azure Data Studio”. The webinar was a precursor to a presentation on Azure Data Studio extension development at PASS Summit 2019. It was a new challenge to present at 3am local time but I’ll (almost) never forgo an opportunity to talk about contributing to open source software.
Open source software presents a unique opportunity to shape the future of a product with modes of involvement for any skillset or interest. Azure Data Studio, a cross-platform product with monthly releases, has a steadily growing pool of contributors from across the data platform community. From reporting bugs to submitting source code pull requests, we’ll review the ways anyone can impact the development Azure Data Studio.
Open source software fosters a level of transparency that simultaneously lowers the barrier to entry for new ideas and raises the collective capability of our accomplishments. As developers and other technologists, we’re working in a time of rapid innovation that stems from the more widespread adoption of open source software and associated practices by large organizations. It is important that as individuals we advocate for and protect the landscape of projects that are benefiting our forward progress.
While visiting an open source project’s code repository might sound like an intimidating proposition, the repository is often much more than just a pile of code. For example, Azure Data Studio’s repository also has insiders (beta) releases, a guide for contributing code, community submitted issues, and more. If you’re using Azure Data Studio and haven’t already voted on some issues, now’s a great time to check out and vote for requested enhancements (or request your own).
When I gave the webinar in September 2019 there were 1,007 open source projects stewarded directly by Microsoft. In February 2020 there are approximately 1,080. Learn more about these projects and ways to get involved at
https://opensource.microsoft.com/
.
There are countless open source projects driven by individuals or smaller collaboratives instead of corporations, often with a large impact. Here are a few such projects within the data platform space:
