Before joining NimbleUser, I spent a decade working with open source software and participating in open source communities. Being part of an open source community, and helping to improve tools we use every day, is an enlightening experience, outside the scope of simple blog entry.
And I miss it. I've tried to stay involved with new projects like Vosao CMS, I answer mail sent to human-response at apache-dot-org, I speak at ApacheCon when I can, and I'm trying to bootstrap an advocacy site with Tim O'Brien. But, it's a struggle to keep up with other projects when I'm still learning so much every day about the Salesforce CRM platform.
One consolation is that Salesforce is built with many products I touched during my open source decade. I worked with Doug Cutter and Jon Stevens to migrate Lucene to Apache Jakarta. Salesforce uses several Apache Commons products that I helped create (along with the Commons itself). So, although I don't get to work on open source projects as much as I used to, I am grateful to be working with a solid, thoughtful product built on a backbone of truly awesome open source components.
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