Once again Pakistani developers have shined our country’s name on an international platform, as they are truly making their mark in the world and not just in the freelance industry but the global platform of open-source development. One such developer is Ahmad Awais who is recognized for becoming one of the few Pakistanis to achieve the Gold GitHub Stars Award, and he is also a Google Developer Expert.
In a recent development, Ahmad had contributed his code to the software of Mars 2020 Helicopter Mission known as the Ingenuity. This was a small contribution amongst many other developers from around the world, which played a significant purpose in mankind’s first triumphant attempt at a regulated flight of an aircraft on Mars.
Read more: NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter made a successful third flight on the Red Planet
To celebrate the occasion, NASA released a statement stating that the team responsible for building Ingenuity is much bigger than JPL’s 6,000 employees. Behind the 4-lb helicopter were entrepreneurs from recognizable corporations like AeroVironment, Lockheed Martin, and Qualcomm. Moreover, the expansive software used in this mission was the contribution of thousands of open source developers around the world, who are unaware of the seriousness of their contributions.
The statement further read, almost 12,000 people contributed code, documentation, graphic design, and much more to the open-source software that helped in making possible Ingenuity’s launch possible. In this regard of this moment in open source history, GitHub also added a new badge to profiles of those contributors.
Furthermore, Ahmad’s main purpose for this contribution was due to a passion for space exploration he had in his early years. Recently, in a blog post, he has commented, “When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut — exploring space and whatnot. But I was afraid of heights, so whenever my mother asked, I’d say I’ll settle as a scientist who’d invent things like rockets. Years went by, reading space exploration missions, then aspiring to meet Elon Musk (the one who rebelled? Right?) — I started to realize how far away I was from actually becoming a rocket scientist.”
Source: TechJuice
