OSS days @ Namshi

As of the 1st of January 2019, Namshi’s techies will be able to take advantage of a new policy that aims to improve our (already positive) relationship with the Open Source world: let me tell you a bit more about what’s cooking!

Namshi ❤ Open Source

We’ve pionereed the Open Source culture in the region, at a time when companies did not fully understand the potential of sharing their work with a broader community. Years ago, it wasn’t easy to find a Dubai-based company sharing their tech out there, and we’re proud to see how that has changed.

It’s not just Namshi, as nowadays you will find companies like Tajawal talking about their stack on Medium, or Al Tayer Digital releasing software on GitHub. We feel partly responsible for that and are happy to see the community growing!

Back to us for a second: since 2012, Namshi has released 80 OS libraries, ranging from debugging utilities to iOS views and Docker images. We did not invent the “library of the century” but we’re happy that others have found our work useful: mockserver and winston-graylog2, for example, get downloaded thousands of times a week — and we definitely feel good about lending a hand to the community.

The truth is that Namshi could not have ever been if it wasn’t for OS technologies: we understand that, and want to be able to give back to the community as much as possible.

With that in mind, we decided to introduce an initiative called “OSS day” to promote the OSS culture within our team.

OSS day @ Namshi

Starting from the 1st of January 2019, engineers within our Tech team will be free to dedicate one day a month on Open Source: no matter whether that’s by working on their own project, collaborate with others in the team, sending a PR to an existing OS project or writing documentation for a random GitHub repo, they will be able to spend some of their “Namshi-time” to help and improve the OS world.

We hope great things will come out of this and, if not, we think this initiative will at least help our team members get acquainted with the Open Source world, so that they can better understand this mysterious pillar of our industry — because, trust me, without OSS we’d be at least 10 years behind.

We do not have a specific “OS budget” (a budget we can spend to support someone else’s OS project), but that is something we’ll be discussing down the line, as it feels the natural next step for a company that cares about the OS world.

Well, that’s about it for today! Happy new year in advance, folks!