Thank a Dev Day 2010

This year, the last Friday of March is 26th, so, that would be, once again the time to remember the authors of your favourite Free Software! So, spread the word!

We have a detailed quide, to help you with your greeting.

The Day is here!

So, now it is the day to send your thanks!

You can read our guide here and translations here (and the logo by harrypopof here, if you want to use it in your blog and spread the word), but remember these simple guidelines:

• Remember to add [TADD] in the beginning of the subject line, to help filtering
• Describe in your own words why you like the software
• If you want, add a little text in the end of the message, like “PS. This message is part of Thank a Dev Day, a project to appreciate Free Software developers:https://thankadev.wordpress.com/”

Here is an example message I sent to one author of one bittorrent client (don’t copy it as it is, it is just an example how to thank a dev ;)) :

Subject:[TADD] Thank you for The Project

Body: Dear Author,
I have been using <the project name here> bittorrent client for about a year now, and nowadays I am using it every day at home (using Gentoo).

It is very easy to use, it is very stable (I haven’t had any bugs when using it),it has very simple GUI, and it does not consume very much of computer’s
resources (Hooray for C! :))

With it, I have been able to successfully download and seed large .iso-files for free software operating systems (of course ;))

Keep up the good work, I am sure I will have premium peer-to-peer experience in the future also, thanks to you and your team!

Best Regards,
Solarius

PS. This message is part of Thank a Dev Day, a project to appreciate Free Software developers:https://thankadev.wordpress.com/

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The detailed guide

The general idea of Thank a Dev Day is to appreciate the developers behind your favorite Free Software application or/and component (preferred target is a not so well known software, or part of a software) by sending an email to the developer. This is how we think is the best way to do it:

1. Find the developer who you would like to thank

2. When you are writing the email, remember to add [TADD] in the beginning of the subject-line. This is mandatory to avoid extra spam for the developer you appreciate.

3. Write to the author that you like his/her piece of code, and also, if possible, tell why you like the software, where do you use it and how often.

4. Be glad! You have just helped a free software project! If you want, you can jump back to step 1.

Basically there it is 🙂

Here, we are speaking about developers, by that, we mean anyone who is participating to a software project, like programmers, translators, document writers etc.

Also, remember that developers are usually quite busy people, and it is possible that they don’t have time to answer your mail, and keep in mind also that if you don’t find the developers e-mail address easily, it is possible that the developer does not want personal mail.

We have a logo!

Thanks to the artist named harrypopof, we have a nice logo now! Sorry that we are so late with that.

Call for translators

The detailed guide will be soon out, in the meanwhile, we are asking for translators, to translate our first blog-post to various languages. There have been texts in Finnish and French so far (thank you very much :)) but we would like to have more. So, if you want to help us, send translations 🙂

Spread the Word!

This is the first year Thank a Dev Day is arranged, and we need your help to spread the word. Tell your friends on Twitter and identi.ca, post news to social news sites, etc.

You can help us get more visibility by upvoting posts at sites like programming.reddit.com, floss.reddit.com and fsdaily.com

Join us in making a memorable day for many developers by spreading the word!

Starting to organize Thank a dev day

So, organizing of the first TADD has begun. For now, the date would be 27.3 this year, which will be fixed to “last Friday of every March“.

The idea

The general idea is to appreciate the creators behind your favorite Free Software application or/and component (preferred target is a not so well known piece of code) by sending an email to the author. This is how we think is the best way to do it:

1. Find the author of the piece of software

2. When you are writing the email, remember to add [TADD] in the beginning of the subject-line. This is mandatory to avoid extra spam for the author you appreciate.

3. Write to the author that you like his/her piece of code, and also, if possible, tell why you like the software, where do you use it and how often.

4. Be glad! You have just helped a free software project! If you want, you can jump back to step 1.

Basically there it is 🙂 We will write a more detailed guide later!