In 2014 Bloomberg hosted its first “Open Source Day” event, which was an experiment to see if we could combine the company’s long history of volunteerism with open source collaboration. We brought one of the Git project’s core developers to New York City, got about 30 employees signed up, and they spent the day learning how to build, test, and improve Git. The event was such a success that we’ve held a half-dozen more, and they’ve grown into weekend events with attendees from our Engineering team, local universities and colleges, and of course the open source community.
We’ve held events for Clang/LLVM, Python, Perl, NumFocus projects (matplotlib, NumPy, SciPy), and others. Attendees have had a lot of fun, learned a great deal about some of their favorite open source projects, and produced patches (some of which have been merged during the event!).
Our next events will be held on October 1 & 2, 2016, in both New York City and London. This time we’ll be working on the Node.js project, which combines two of the most important programming languages for Bloomberg: JavaScript and C++. We have a long history of behind-the-scenes development in the JavaScript community, but this event will bring more of our developers into the community to participate in open source collaboration.
If you’re interested in learning about the inner details of Node.js, and more importantly, how you can help improve it, register for one of these events! You’ll enjoy it, meet people who share your interests, and maybe become a regular contributor to Node.js.
If you’re a Node.js committer or experienced contributor and are willing to act as a mentor at one of these events, let us know! We’ll provide travel and lodging so you can focus on doing what you enjoy: writing code and helping others learn.
