Being Arctic Code Vault contributors

4 min read

July 19, 2022

Did you know there is a data repository of thousand OSS projects in the Arctic? Our code is in there! ❤️

Mountain at Svalbard

Winter has started in the Southern Hemisphere, and that fills our pride. That's because 1/4 of our engineering team is involved in this colossal project Github has been supporting since 2020. The 🏔️ Arctic Code Vault 🏔️

"The GitHub Arctic Code Vault is a data repository preserved in the Arctic World Archive (AWA), a very-long-term archival facility 250 meters deep in the permafrost of an Arctic mountain." 🤯

Check it out:

The whole goal of the project is to preserve open-source software for future generations. As the rusty OSS maintainer, I am now, I can say there is no better reward than being recognized for your contributions. You can't dimension how helpful a contribution to some tool can be until you realize it's being used by someone far away from you that was having the same challenge you had by the time you did the contribution.

If you have been part of some OSS project before, you know that it is time-consuming and hard to find the right time to do it naturally. And despite you can make something great, isolated which can potentially be OSS, publishing and maintaining it is not as simple. However, if you look the other half of the glass, you will find out how rewarding it is.

This post's intention is to congratulate our team for being part of the Arctic Code Vault, motivate more software engineers to keep contributing to OSS projects and share with you that at Streaver, we are open to help. Please feel free to reach out in case you want to start doing some OSS and don't know where to start. You can drop a line in the comments below, send a message via our contact form, mention us in your tweet (Tweeter account), share your thoughts on mentioning us on LinkedIn or any other means you find comfy.

And yes, I could not have missed the part about sharing a picture of us at Svalbard.

Picture of Nicolas Alonso Picture of Federico Kauffman Picture of Fabián Larrañaga

Sorry, this place is restricted; it's impossible to get there by yourself. As you can imagine, it's highly protected. Not only because code is being preserved but also because the seed vault database is located a few meters away from it. Nothing to do with software, but if you are as curious as we are, you can check more at seedvault.nordgen.org 🌱

Lastly, and coming back to the initiative, if you get contributions stored in the Github's Arctic Code Vault, you will be gifted in your Github profile with a badge like this:

Github's Arctic Code Vault badge

You can see all the badges you may have earned through the years at your Github's profile; this is mine) in case you are curious about how it shows. Having badges is another great Github's initiative in my opinion 👏 . Cheers!

Lastly, let me invite you to check our previous contributions. We will be posting upcoming OSS initiatives in our social networks so stay tuned if you want to know more.

That's all, I hope you enjoyed and learned something new today!