Givin’ back

At work, we use a CRM service called Salesforce; part of my job has been to use their API to integrate our web site with their service. Primarily, this consists of having a user fill out a form and then send it to the Salesforce API for the data to be turned into a record in their system.

Since we use PHP as our web scripting language of choice, I have been using their Salesforce API client for PHP (a Sourceforge project). After working with it for a bit, I hacked the source to making working with it a bit easier. I submitted two patches for the code to the project; two days ago, the project released a new version of the PHP client that included my patches.

Very happy about this; I am officially a contributor to the open source movement. My changes were minor, and the project will not impact the world or have the exposure that Linux or PHP itself will. But, I’m still doing an inner geek dance about it. It’s peer validation in my mind, someone saying “Yes, Luis, you actually do have good ideas and can produce useful code”.