On August 7 2019 my son Fabian was born. I had 4 weeks of parental leave planned to support my partner in these often stressful times. Turned out that Fabian was and still is easy going and we were able to enjoy a lot of quality time with him. And I also had plenty of hours in the evening for myself, while the rest of the family was sleeping. During this time I started working out
OpenSIT conceptually, catching up on what I missed in the last couple of years of JavaScript advancements and picking the right tools to get the job done. About 3 weeks later I had a good MVP up and running, and it needed another couple of weeks to refine it and sweat the details (and with help from
colin.krawchuk2 make it look good). I had set myself the goal to have OpenSIT ready for release at SAP Inside Track Netherlands. On November 23 2019 I was
able to present and launch OpenSIT to a small group of community members in Hertogenbosch (
slide deck), and it has been a fun ride watching it grow up.
Since then many SAP Inside Tracks moved online only due to COVID, recorded their sessions. I added a total number of 242 session by 198 speakers at 20 SAP Inside Track events. The
@opensitnet Twitter account, which sends out each day a link to a single session at 11pm CET (randomly picked by a script), has some 320+ followers and it is slowly growing. I have no idea how many daily visits the site gets, because on purpose I don’t run any web tracking (actually I took great care of not setting any cookie at all for visitors of the site). Beside the yearly fee for the
https://opensit.net domain there is no cost involved in running the site (thanks to
Github,
Netlify and
GraphCMS). I’ve optimized the process of adding new content to make it the least painful for me (while the SIT organizers have to suffer from filling out a Google sheet ?). At
SAP Inside Track Online I gave a session about OpenSIT, of course
available on OpenSIT, which ticked another checkbox in my TODO list. So in summary it is a stable operation with hopefully some value but no clear insight if anybody is actually using it (in case you do, please leave a comment). Perfect conditions for the next step…
The source for
OpenSIT is hosted on Github, and from today on the repository is now publicly available.
OpenSIT is now officially open source!
Why am I doing this? The same reason I started building OpenSIT: to get my hands dirty and learn how to build a website with the modern web development tools and frameworks that are available these days. And I learned a lot and I’m still flabbergasted about the depth and richness this ecosystem is offering. The code probably needs plenty of improvements, and I still haven’t implemented everything I want. This is also my first foray into functional programming, and I would assume
dj.adams and others have probably plenty of ideas how to improve my code. But again this is why I’m putting the code now out, to learn and share…
SAP Community style.
