Open source is valuable in many ways, and as more and more people in the financial services industry realize this and embrace said value, it creates a mutually beneficial ecosystem for those involved.

For Matt Joyce, senior devops engineer at Symphony, open source has been part of his career for years. Working at NASA on the open source project now known as OpenStack, he has seen firsthand how valuable open source software can be across different industries.

Matt explained that he sees open source as the future of work, adding that with open source projects, “you never know what something is going to be used for until people actually start using it.”

As a resident python aficionado, Matt spearheaded the python-symphony project and contributed it to the Foundation. He wrote the code for it because, at the time, there wasn’t a module interface for python. It’s described as a module that “provides a real-time wrapper around the Symphony REST APIs to simplify the creation of chat sessions, room access, presence, messaging and more.”

With more and more use cases coming up within the platform, Matt later contributed the Metronome project. He wanted a Symphony bot designed to provide end-to-end diagnostic information to the Symphony Engineering Services team. Essentially, the bot “logs into your Symphony pod, and then joins a cross pod chat room and begins to send messages with some basic information about the pod environment.”

Matt has worked on various projects within the open source community, and tirelessly fixes issues associated with many of these projects. He says that there are projects that are in the process of becoming incredibly useful tools for the platform, and in the end, “you learn a lot when you’re working in open source,” adding that people who work in open source are “nicer and more frank about the issues that come up.”

“It’s great that customers can share code amongst each other,” Matt said of the Foundation. “We’re seeing growth all the time, and these projects will even become more useful down the line.”

Interested in contributing a project to the Foundation? Learn more about the project processes here.