Open Source: An integral part of Intuit engineering culture

JyotiI Ahuja
Director of Engineering, Intuit
 

Open Source: A disruptive technology

Open source is at the core of digital innovation and has seen an explosion of enterprise-ready and developer-friendly projects. With the proliferation of open-source applications, companies are addressing major business challenges, and are investing in innovation regardless of scale. Intuit has long been a consumer and beneficiary of open-source projects, and believes in tapping into and sharing knowledge to address the urgent financial issues of its customers.

By tapping into the collective knowledge of developers, we prioritize innovation, and encourage creative problem-solving by including developers from different industries and with diverse backgrounds. Open source is a natural fit for Intuit and is an important part of our Intuit engineering culture, resonating with our mission of powering prosperity around the world. From a practical perspective, a more open approach also helps us develop better products.

From Intuit-led projects like Argo, Karate, and Truffle Shuffle to our employee contributions to many other projects, we have never been more committed to the principles and practice of open source. This includes exploring new ways to innovate in software development, such as open source, aiding us in giving back to the community and solving for our customers’ most pressing financial problems with speed and agility.

It enables engineers to work on diverse technology stacks beyond their teams’ domain and helps increase overall engineering group awareness to solve code-based problems. We have been an active contributor to the broader community of technologies and products used in production.

Open sourcing a project helps us speed up development and highlight any potential blind spots we may have missed. We actively encourage our teams to contribute to open source and host many activities to engage engineers to contribute. In fact, this last year we encouraged our engineers virtually to contribute to Open Source projects and last October, we had a month-long celebration of Open Source – Hacktoberfest which was an opportunity to connect with and celebrate the open source community and increase involvement from diverse contributors, around the world.