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Open Source and Help Me Bounce

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Author: Sandy Powell on
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Ever since I was a kid, computers and technology have always been at the forefront of my mind. My father was interested in electronics and by trait also into computers. As technology progressed, the ability to own a personal computer was also possible. 

In its infancy, computer programming was all about code sharing and open source.

Floppy disks existed for other computers, but for ours we only had tape. This meant the only way to have a game or application was to code it yourself. 

To get a new program, my father had to scour a magazine which had pages and pages of code that I, in turn, needed to type into the machine. Then we would save these programs onto a tape. While this time-consuming process has drastically changed since those days, the idea of open source actually hasn’t changed that much.

Open-source platforms have always been a driving force of the industry. It’s become the innovative technology that allows us to not only be more productive but solve many of societies issues. Even in the health industry they have turned to open-source platforms to solve DNA, RNA and protein sequences as a game. This allowed the industry to solve a sequence that was a major hurdle and save many lives. The health industry has now taken that same open-source idea and is using AI to solve these same issues. Without an entire industry solving these problems it’s doubtful that we would have had a vaccination for Covid-19 as soon as we did. 

Open source goes well beyond just healthcare, it’s part of every computer advancement today. It’s the very reason our Help Me Bounce platform can exist. 

Help Me Bounce is written on a framework called Drupal in which is open source. Then Drupal itself is written over php, unix and mysql. Every one of those technologies is open source and relies on countless numbers of people to support it. The real irony is that 80% of all websites run on Unix or some form of the Unix kernel.  The other irony is that without Unix I doubt Apple would have a resurgence as a viable alternative to PC’s. Apple used to create their own operating system and changed in 2001 to run over the Unix kernel.

So why does open source matter, and why mention it?

As I stated www.helpmebounce.org runs on open source. Without this technology, Help Me Bounce would not be viable. If the platform did exist it would take unimaginable development effort, man hours, or doing things manually… remember faxes? 

Recently, we implemented the Help Me Bounce Blog (where you are right at this instant!). While the creation process took longer than any of us would have liked, it was relatively quick to implement. 

When I was a kid, building this blog would have taken writing everything by hand outside of open source. Every form field, validation, and display would have taken thousands upon thousands of lines of code. Then once completed who knows how many errors would have shown up! I used to work in an industry that didn’t use open-source frameworks.  After new feature sets, we would sometimes run into 300+ bugs.  With open source, we rarely if ever run into major bugs and can implement new ideas fairly quickly. 

I have no doubt as time progresses things will become increasingly easy to implement. The future of development is more about ideas than the how, which is an extremely exciting proposition. 

This means the future of Help Me Bounce will be idea driven more than technologically limited. So, I look forward to seeing where our ideas will take this platform in the future.

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Sandy Powell Signature
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Sandy Powell
Senior Software Development Manager
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Help Me Bounce, Operations, Technology