One of my goals is to change my mindset from thinking “wouldn’t it be cool if …” to thinking “I’ll just add this feature to package X.” I use a lot of open source Java development packages, and I oftentimes think of features that would be nice to have in them. Rather than just musing about it, I should be adding these features, especially if they’d help me get my job done at work. The thing working against this is lack of time and lack of initiative. I think I can mitigate both of those factors, though. I’ve already started taking other steps toward this by actually figuring things out by reading the source code of open source applications that I use, who needs documentation when you have the code itself? Adding code and submitting patches seems like a small step forward from that.