This won't be a purely technical article per say. I avoid writing about personal things but I have a lot of thoughts I'd like to share with you and maybe it helps somebody make sense of it all.
Why write this?
My grandparents were the people who raised me and looked after me ever since I was little, I would spend all my time with them while my parents worked to provide for the family and they lived right below us so they were always a step away.
Through my childhood they thought me to be kind to others, to help as much as I can, to understand what others are going through and to never be selfish and rude to others.
Ever since my grandfather passed away a bit over a year and a half ago around New Years I made a life resolution, instead of a New Years one.
I'll help others more
His passing really shook me to my core, and the pain of not being able to see him again never really goes away. All the great memories come flashing in whenever I think about him and it's really hard to stay unphased. I promised myself I will live a humble and modest life both of them lived together and they will forever be my role-models. Even though they grew up in a different time and they didn't understand computers and technology I worked with everyday really well, I knew they would've been proud of the fact that I was doing open-source as it is a means of helping others and that is where all my motivation and drive comes from.
Last week my grandma had a heart attack at 4 AM in the morning and she didn't even go to the ER as she thought it was just a random pain. We took her on Friday and they admitted her right away as they realised what really happened to her, but she was always like that, always a huge fighter and you could never tell she was in any pain or having a bad mood. We went to see her on Saturday and she was really happy to see us all, she cried that she got admitted at this exact time as my wife's graduation ceremony is this Friday so she was worried she isn't going to make it in time to be admitted out of the hospital. She was so proud of my wife and wanted to climb 4 flights of stairs to watch her finish her studies and become a doctor as sick as she was.
While going through a routine procedure to check the effects the heart-attack had on her, and after putting 4 stents in, she just fell asleep and her heart gave out. She passed away in peace and took a part of my heart with her.
...
Helping others
I always thought there are two primary ways to help others, both through gifts, you can give people two things you own that can impact their lives:
Time
Money
We consider money to be precious, and we base the value of all things on money, so naturally giving away money is the easiest and most straight-forward way of helping others as you're giving away something valuable that others can trade for whatever they need in their lives, whether it's food, water, shelter, or something else.
Time is tricky, unlike money, time is limited in supply and giving it away is far more valuable than giving away money, when you give somebody time you're giving him a piece of your life, and in return they leave a piece of theirs in yours. Time is our greatest enemy as we all have our set amount, but it is our greatest gift as we learn to appreciate the time we have, we can't buy it, we can't sell it, we can just have it and use it in the best way we know how until we run out.
I think time is the hardest to, but the most rewarding to give, you can give it to anyone and you earn something back whenever you do, whether it be a memory or an experience, it's worth it. You feel much more fulfilled by painting your mums walls than you do giving away 100$ to charity, you feel better babysitting your sisters son than you do donating 10$ at the checkout.
What is open-source to me?
What is open-source, but giving away your precious time?
I don't mean giving it in a sense of:
"Hey, I'll work 5h today on my open-source, that's around X $$ I'm giving away for free!"
I like to look at the big picture here, you're not just giving away your time in a sense you're giving away your potential monetary value for free, no, you're giving away your time to help others save their time and avoid problems and issues you ran into. You give them the ability to save countless hours of hitting their head against the wall by just using your solution that you've lost time on because you didn't know the problem at the time.
You give others your time and knowledge, you package it and make it available to the masses for consumption, in the ultimate goal of saving them time! What do they gain if you save them time? They get more time in return, they can spend it however they want, they can spend it writing even more code that saves them, or others, time, they can spend it doing something for themselves, or they can spend it with their families.
Life is not all about work, as much as we pride ourselves in our work, it's about the moments we spend with our loved ones and the impact we make on their lives, they deserve our gift of time the most, as it is so precious, and I mean to gift you that time as much as I can by helping you save time on work through open-source. Even if I help 1 person save 1 hour debugging something through remix-development-tools, even if it's an hour saved through writing your own implementation of remix-toast, whether it's an hour through a line of code, or thousands of them, you DESERVE that hour and use it as best as you can.
Thank you
I usually use this section to thank you for reading the article and link to my socials, this time I will use this section to thank my family for everything they have thought me, thank my loved ones for supporting me and thank you for reading this.
I know my grandparents would be proud of the path I have chosen and this is my final homage to them. I love them more than any words can describe and I will miss them as long as I'm alive.
They have left a true legacy behind them and I only aspire to leave a legacy behind me that impacts lives as much as they impacted mine.
Thank you once again for everything,
May you rest in peace.