The Spirit of Open Source in a Modern .NET World with Scott Harden

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Show Notes

"One of the projects that I work on right now that's probably one of my more successful ones, It's a scientific data visualization library for .NET. It's called ScottPlot. The name is silly. It's because when I made it, I thought I was the only person going to be using it. And then some other people started using it and that wasn't totally unexpected. But now it's about a million and a half installs on NuGet. I think it has like 5,000 stars on GitHub. It's really cool just to watch this thing grow."— Scott Harden

Welcome friends to The Modern .NET Show; the premier .NET podcast, focusing entirely on the knowledge, tools, and frameworks that all .NET developers should have in their toolbox. We are the go-to podcast for .NET developers worldwide, and I am not your host: Jamie. I'm Delilah and I will be recording the intro for this episode because Jamie is suffering with a throat infection.

In this episode, Scott Harden joined us for the first of three episodes on .NET, open source, and NuGet. This part of the conversation is all about what Scott calls "The Spirit of Open Source in a Modern .NET World." This is the background information on why Scott (and Jamie) believe that developers should look to creating open source works, putting them out there, and gathering feedback from people. Not only will it enhance your technical skill set (and very quickly), but it will also allow you to get experience at failing in a safe space: in public.

"Now, humans evolved to like helping people in our in-group. And I think it means a lot that we treat anonymous strangers on the Internet, or we can treat them. Obviously, this can go wrong. But we can treat them as part of our in-group. Like, "hey, we are all in this technical world together. We are struggling. Let's figure this out together." And that bridge of trust and effort and you're sharing your knowledge with another person, it is such a positive experience all around the table"— Scott Harden

This episode has a lot of resources in the accompanying show notes, so if you're listening along in a podcast player make sure to head to the website (there'll be a link). That way you don't miss out on all the wonderful things Scott and Jamie talked about.

And remember, this is just part one. In the next two parts, Scott and I talk about creating NuGet packages, ensuring their safety and security, and how to be a good citizen of the open source community. Talk about a festive gift for you all.

And definitely go ahead and check out Scott's work and writings. He's a really interesting person, an amazing open source contributor, and an all-round great person.

Anyway, without further ado, let's sit back, open up a terminal, type in `dotnet new podcast` and we'll dive into the core of Modern .NET.

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