To give back..

Being in the software industry for 20+ years, I benefited from open source software most of my professional career. It gave me insights into software design, architecture etc. However, I always felt I was taking more than giving (apart from donating to open source project I have used) , mainly due to laziness and also, most of the problems seem solved by the excellent open source community. About a few months ago I decided to take a break from my professional career and take on a pet project (more on it in a later blog). But as part of research on the project I needed to render a satellite image of a lat/lon and place 3D objects on top of it. Quite a few npm packages were available but what caught my eye was three-geo . It has a good API and demos. But as I started to use it I became curious to look at the code. As I started to read it, I realized that with the advent of async await and the need to use only a portion of the code (I needed only the satellite image and not the vector image), I decided to refactor it. Started with developing it as a class within my project and then when it was ready, I suddenly realized, why not release it as a separate npm package.

All it took was take the pieces out, slap a package.json, pick a meaningful package name for it, create a new npm user for yourself and publish it. Viola! I published my first npm package three-mapbox-satellite . I updated the package with a few minor fixes as I started to use it in my project, but overall I felt happy of doing my bit for the open source community...

TL;DR Took an existing npm package, spent time understanding the code and completely refactored/simplified portion of it and released it as a new npm package.