PropertyCross

Today, the open source project I have been contributing to has been ‘released’! PropertyCross was founded by my colleagues Chris Price and Colin Eberhardt to help developers choose a cross-platform mobile application development framework. We’re aiming to be to the TODOMvc for mobile development. Check out Colin’s introductory post for an overview of the 14 applications we’ve developed so far.

So far, I’ve contributed the Xamarin Android implementation and as a Christmas coding project I’m developing the native Android version. We’re supplying native implementations of an application on each framework to act as a benchmark for the cross-platform implementations.

This is the first open-source project I have contributed to. There are many articles describing why working on open-source projects is beneficial. Personally I’ve found that it breaks you out of your comfort zone, presents the opportunity to learn new technologies, processes and is a great way of building reputation within the community. I’ve had the opportunity to learn git, improve my Android skills and delve into Xamarin’s Mono for Android framework.

Contribute!

Contributions are welcomed – we don’t bite! We are on Github. In my opinion this is a space which is going to move very quickly – frameworks which are popular now may not be in a year, html5 is now finalized and on top of that the mobile operating systems are evolving rapidly. Opportunities like this are a great chance for developers to diversify their skills.