The Joys of Being a Staunch Follower

Personally, learning a new technology and improving myself in those I already know keeps me motivated and on track. More importantly, this fact of learning newer technologies brings in a certain “awe” factor in life.

My association with free software has been a catalyst. Free software, or any community-based software, is often shunned by the masses due to its complicated ways of working, unlike their proprietary counterparts.

This is an advantage for someone like me. Recently, I was supposed to make a design for a particular electronic circuit. As a free software lover, I always use KiCad for such designs. Unfortunately, this time I was supposed to use a component which wasn’t available in the default libraries, nor could I find this component anywhere over the internet. At this point many of us would complain about free software and move on to proprietary counterparts, showing off the availability of such rare modules on those platforms. Being a staunch free software supporter, I did not want to end up using pirated proprietary software, hence it took me a few hours to sit, learn, and make my own component.

So, at the end of it all I learnt something new, something I always wanted to but wasn’t finding time for.

Free software may be complicated, it may require you to do a few extra steps compared to their counterparts, but the benefit of those few extra steps is much greater than easing your work using non-free software.