I come from a world where strategy is best kept secret. Whether it be from a company who has a codename for literally everything, or the competitive culture of playing and coaching D1 athletics, confidentiality became a required skill. Meetings, trainings, code reviews, scouting reports… anything of significance happened behind closed doors. In other words, definitely not open source.

Every single app — large or small, open source or not — has room for improvement when it comes to performance. This is why we created Skylight for Open Source to give open source contributors the tools they need to find these issues. Over the next week, we'll show you three different open source apps running on Skylight, each with their own unique performance challenges, varying in complexity.

Open source has come a long way. Open source components are the building blocks of arguably every organization’s software. According to Stack Overflow’s 2018 developer survey results, nearly half of professional developers contribute to open source projects, and 40% listed contribution to open source software as part of their non-formal learning background.

Here at Skylight, we love all things open source. Many of us on the Skylight team are open source contributors ourselves. From our own experiences, we know that many people are excited about the idea of contributing to their favorite open source apps, but they don’t always necessarily know where to start.