By Sandy Bei, Data Scientist & 
Giannis Skaltsas, Full Stack Developer
With Meta (aka Facebook) announcing the Metaverse, more and more people are going to be more familiar with the online world. Words like “web app”, “api”, “blockchain”,” cryptocurrency” etc. are going to be our next reality. But how did we end up with all these amazing innovations?
Right now, developers from all around the globe are working on their unique projects, innovative ideas or in bigger teams and organizations on a ready product.
The significant thing here is that teams are not working alone. Instead there is a whole community supporting their effort in various ways. This community, which is called the open source community, connects these diverse groups of people under the same goal, accelerating technological innovation.
An important characteristic of a healthy and functional community is for its members to help each other and share common interests. This is where the term open-source comes in place. In particular, in the software development community, open-source means code that is free and open for any developer to access, view, modify and contribute to.
In the dev-community, sharing is caring is the real deal. There are platforms-forums like Stack Overflow (ask your neighborhood developer about it) where people from all around the globe can ask programming related questions and every time someone will respond with an answer even for the easiest questions. Or Medium, a blog sharing platform where freelance developers, companies and scientific teams share their knowledge through blogs and tutorials on new technologies. You can find IRES in Medium (click here) where our data science team is really active, with a lot of useful tutorials in data science, machine learning, dev-ops and web development.
Watching online technologies evolve at explosive rates, it makes crystal clear that sharing and contributing is the way to go. This makes us wonder what advances in technologies would rise if similar efforts for sharing knowledge were put into other scientific and research communities.