You don’t need to be a expert to get started as a contributor. A core tenet to improving OSS is people trying things out, asking questions, and opening issues. And there are many platforms created to facilitate this, like Stack Overflow, Discourse, Github, and Bitbucket, to name a few.

So this week, along with your Instagram memes and Facebook statuses, try posting to an OSS project, and help drive the community towards more solid, safe, and accessible software.

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So what has changed? A lot, obviously—but broadly speaking, how we build sites, how a computer interprets them, and how people use them has evolved. Back then Javascript was a “nice to have” and you certainly didn’t let it dominate the client-side experience. Arguably this is still true, but users’ expectations have changed and the user experience has changed with it.

So are we on the right path? Are things settling down or just getting started? For this week’s theme, I invite you to look back at how things were 5, 10, 15+ years ago in technology, what has stayed consistent, what has fallen out of favor, and think critically about what we are doing today in development processes for the better.

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You’re likely familiar with things like the 4-hour work week and the Pomodoro Technique (a.k.a. tomato timer), but have you tried it? I’ve always had an internal drive to be efficient, be organized, try not to waste time, resources—but have never tried using my work time more efficiently because the 40 hour work week is an institution of the industrialized world. Eight hours of sleep, eight hours of work, eight hours of leisure. But I came across a medium post introducing the idea of “deep work,” which—as you can guess—means short, hyper-focused spurts of work as opposed to low velocity, highly distracted long periods of work.

But you don’t have to turn your whole routine upside down to see if it’s for you—sometime this week, try setting a period of time, set a goal for that period of time, and do nothing but work toward that goal for the allotted time. When that time’s up, get up, think about something else, move around—just take a short break whether you’re done or not—then go back and do it again.

However you do it, be deliberate with your time.

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With the holidays around the corner, this is a great time to slow down, reflect, and remind ourselves what it is about our careers that brought us here in the first place: we get tech and we want to do great things. Let’s keep an eye on the horizon and try to imagine where it is we want to go.

Remember that explorers don’t take paths — they have to make them.

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Last week we looked inward and tried to center ourselves; this week we look outward and consider how competition is embedded in our lives. Competition drives innovation in fair markets and it also pushes us to be a little bit better than we thought we could. While sometimes obvious (like in sports), competition also happens every day in more subtle ways. Like selecting the github project with 2,000 stars instead of 200 — there was a developer or a team somewhere saying “I could do this better.”

The concept of competition is rooted in choice — so this week I challenge you to look at the choices you make every day and consider how competition has created that opportunity. Tap into that inner competitive drive we all have in some regard and use it to push yourself to be just a little better than even you thought you could be.

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Challenge yourself to think about how your professional life and personal life compliment each other, and use something from one to benefit the other. Are you logging a bunch of work hours just to stay afloat? Maybe blowing off a bit early for happy hour allows you to come back fresh and more productive. Maybe it’s making time for exercise during the week to clear your head and think about a problem you’ve been stuck on.

This week, find your fulcrum and see if you can make big gains — both professionally and personally — with just a little effort.

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