I thought that the lessons from the essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, by Eric. S Raymond were both extremely interesting and very valuable to a programmer such as myself. In its essence, the essay explores the fundamental shift in attitude towards open-source projects after the creation of maybe the most famous open-source project to this day, Linus Torvalds’ Linux. Raymond writes about not just the markers of a good programmer, but the markers of a good “hacker”, from which much of the concept of open-source derives. Raymond says that Torvalds contributed to the shift in attitude towards open-source development by using the method of “bazaar-style” creation as opposed to “cathedral style”. By this, he means that Torvalds did not try to frame all of his desired functionality himself. Instead, he treated all users as prospective developers, allowing anyone to propose new functionality and make contributions. This management style allowed the project to take on a life of its own, creating functionality that Torvalds would never have initially imagined. As Raymond puts it, “Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging”(CATB 3). Today, we see that lots of open-source software operates using this method of “bazaar-style” development where users can propose new features and make contributions to other feature requests. Another point that Raymond brings up about how Linux underwent such rapid development is by securing a large number of users and developers. This allows a project’s issues to be reported and fixed rapidly. On top of this, Raymond encourages developers to release often, instead of waiting a long time to make sure a particular version is bug-free. He says that with early and often releases, which incentives developers to create and become more interactive. He claims that his way, bugs get found more quickly, features get added more rapidly, and developers stay active. I think that many of the themes and lessons from this essay are important to anyone wanting to become more active in the open-source community, and serve as a great guidebook for principles to follow when creating.