August 4, 2013

My life and career have lead me to learn languages and jargon. They have been the foundation to build sucessful research or relationships. After 3 years slowly walking towards starting my own company, I notice a new language and culture growing inside me. It’s based on the hundreds of open source tools I’m using. I can’t thank anyone for building ‘French’ or for the quantum physics jargon. But since I know the authors of my open source tools, I can thank them directly. This post is my token of appreciation.

Entrepreneurship news (and PR) love to forget the failures, the bad decisions, the wasted time, the procrastination, the effort and sweat, the lonely nights, and that programming book that you left right after the for-loop chapter. They love that simple app which took 5 days to code, 3 months to fund, and made you überrich. But of course it took 5 years of coding before you could create an app in a few days, years of networking before that “lucky intro” and tons of projects withering on the to-do list which never made it.

I see the same selective amnesia with our tools. The media like to describe instagram as just uploads and filters … but do people thank Django, Fabric or Gunicorn for making it possible?

The vision and generosity of the open source community has let me explore potential applications, ideas, algorithms and designs … for free! I feel lucky and privileged to live this historical moment of free technology and want to thank the tool-makers. (I’ll skip the assembly language and MOFSET designers as I’ve never had to really learn or tweak those). I hope to make meaningful contributions, so to you all, thank you for letting me play with these tools in the last 4 years.

Thank you Python, Potsgresql, MySql, twitter bootstrap, Django, Apache, OSQA, Blender, git, gimp, scrapy, Discourse, PostGis, NGINX, Wordpress, HTML5, JQuery, Javascript, GeoDjango, Inkscape, OpenShotVideo Alwaysdata, Webfaction, South, bitbucket, Github, emacs, drupal, ImageMagick, Ubuntu and all the ones I may have forgotten.

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