That’s a bit of an absurd statement for someone who doesn’t really make many contributions to open source to make. But I stand by it.

I saw a question on Reddit earlier on today that asked “What paid software does a front-end developer need?”, which got me thinking:

What paid software do I actually use?

And the answer is very little. But more surprising to me was that the vast majority of the tools I use to earn a living are Free and open source.

At any given point in time, I can take a look at the source code for:

• My text editor (VSCode)
• My terminal emulator (Hyper)
• My build tools (Webpack, Babel)
• The runtime for my build tools (Node)
• My version control system (Git)

And that’s not even counting the fact that open source practically powers the web.

Without open source software, I probably wouldn’t have gotten started in this industry, and I wouldn’t be able to pay my bills doing something I so greatly enjoy.

Support your friendly neighbourhood open source developer, folks. Without them, the web would be a very different place.