When I initially got involved in the WordPress project, I didn’t know a thing about open source. For all I knew, open source meant that the software was free and of poor quality compared to a commercial solution.

Fast forward several years and I truly understand what open source means. People from all walks of life contributing there knowledge to further a software project. This can be in the form of code, support forums, translations, bug reports, and a number of other things.

These days, I don’t look at open source projects as junk. Instead, I see them as opportunities for people and generally, the software is decent. Open source has come a long way in my time. Most of the open source projects used to be hosted on SourceForge which isn’t the case anymore for a number of reasons. Instead, GitHub is where I see a lot of projects being hosted.

WordPress has given me the opportunity to learn about PHP, CSS, dependencies, and several other technical subjects. As many others have found out, WordPress is a gateway drug to technologies used on the web.

If you want to learn about CSS pre-processors, PHP, open source software development, PHP, CSS, jQuery, JavaScript, dependencies, backwards compatibility, and more, you could do a lot worse than getting involved with the WordPress project.