I enjoy contributing to Open Source software. Due to my experience, most of the contributions are to web based software.
Ruby on Rails is a web development framework that is used by thousands of developers across the world. I've contributed a patch to it to make it easier to test and debug email sending.
Redmine and ChiliProject are web project management applications. Over several years I contributed hundreds of changes including new visual designs, parts of the plugin system, a specialized scripting language to allow users to automate tasks, and many more. ChiliProject was a fork of Redmine that I ran for a couple of years before passing the leadership on.
While working on Redmine and ChiliProject I authored over 100+ plugins for those systems. These plugins performed a variety of functions for the users ranging from email communication, project planning (Kanban, Scrum), budgeting, and process automation. Many of these plugins have been Open Sourced and released on my Github account.
eXPlainPMT (eXPlain Project Management Tool) is an open source web application that helps manage projects using the Extreme Programming methodology. I contributed to get the system production ready in the summer of 2005.
The Free Geek Database is an internal program used by Free Geek as a point of sale system. I have contributed several patches to fix bugs in the system and am now a direct developer and committer to the code base.
Active Merchant is a payment library for Ruby that interfaces with many credit card gateways. I've written adapters to use Chase's Paymentech and TransFirst's Advanced gateway.
Shipping is a Ruby library that provides an easy to use shipping API. It can be used to calculate shipping costs and track orders through UPS, Fedex, and USPS. I was resonable for adding support for getting a shipping price estimate from USPS. My version of shipping
Each tip includes a way to improve your store: customer analysis, analytics, traffic, SEO, customer acquisition, Rich Results, CRO... plus plenty of puns and amazing alliterations.