I have been a long time fan of open source software. Over the years I have utilized countless open source projects to accomplish large tasks with ease for both my day job and my consulting work. Using these projects has always saved me a lot of reinventing the wheel and has made work on projects much easier.

For the past three and a half years, I have been working in a very heavy Microsoft shop. As a result, it was always difficult to get acceptance for open source projects at Cover-All. The more work I started doing on web projects the easier it became to bring some open source into the fold but there certainly wasn’t any interest in giving anything back to those projects we benefited from and, even if there was interest, there wouldn’t have been time to do so anyway.

At VendAsta, things are a lot different. Here is a company that not only embraces the use of open source projects but actually encourages everyone to give back to those projects if they make any improvements / changes to them. I absolutely love that! This has given me the opportunity to give back to my first open source project!

I have been doing some work on developing Facebook applications over the past few weeks. Specifically, I have been using the awesome pyFacebook library. This is a Python library which gives the same functionality as the Facebook-supplied PHP client library, except with the goodness of Python. A total bonus for us is the fact that the library includes functionality to work with Google App Engine, another new technology we are using. There was a small gap in this functionality and that is where I found my opportunity. While everything was setup to work with retrieving information from Facebook in GAE (Google has disabled socket access in the version of Python available through GAE, so you need to use their urlfetch method instead of calls to httplib), the Photos.upload() method was not setup in the same manner. I needed to upload files to Facebook, so I modified the library to work the way I needed.

Once my mods were complete I sent them to the maintainer of the pyFacebook project and, after a few helpful suggestions from him, I had a version that he was willing to commit to the project’s svn repository: http://code.google.com/p/pyfacebook/source/detail?r=166. After that I was able to track down and fix an actual bug involving some infinite redirects: http://code.google.com/p/pyfacebook/source/detail?r=168.

Two very small contributions to a single project, but I am hopeful that this is only the beginning!