I made my first sizeable contribution to the Open Source community over the past week or so. It’s been interesting.

Usually, I scheme ways to make money off the code I’m writing. Also, I need to believe in what I’m making or I won’t be motivated.

In reality, my schemes almost never make me money; I’ve learnt that the easiest way to make money programming (for me at this moment in time) is to hire a boss or client to pay me.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t contribute.

I hate OAuth with the fiery and eternal hatred of a thousand burning stars, and I know other Objective-C developers do, too. I’ve also heard from coworkers that developers are looking for a drop-in API library to the 500px API service.

So I wrote one.

My goal was to make something I could be proud of, and I’m halfway there. Requests can be signed with OAuth, but still need to be loaded over the network. Now that I have the request creation taken care of, I’m going to write a layer to abstract the network requests away altogether. Oh, and it’s completely tested, as well. (Maybe not with unit tests, more like integration tests, but tested nonetheless.)