I joined github in 2010 and it has been my primary source for reading and writing code. I took my baby steps doing open source programming reading others code and it has been a good source of knowledge for me. Since then I have written quite some open source software. I have written some javascript, python and go code and shared those projects in github. Open Source has quite some good benefits as it gives you a nice place to hack on things that fancy your imagination.
But there is certain downside to this as well. Sometimes your primary work(paid job) takes up all the time and you don’t have any time and energy left to spend on side projects. This is something that has happened to me since last 1.5-2 years. I have tackled very nice hard and challenging problems at work. I worked on complex scaling issues, performance tuning and lots of new features that really added value to the product. But I hardly found any time for myself. I have struggled for properly managing my time and it makes me a bit sad. But these days, I am writing some amount of code regularly.
I hope to write some more open source code in the coming time.