Chosen
For most of my “web career”, I have been a definite taker of open source projects and not much of a giver. While I’ve always liked the idea of sharing work, I’ve always found an excuse to pass (not enough time, someone better than me should do that, baseball is on tv). Thankfully, Harvest asked me to spend some time working on a project we could share and no excuses were allowed.
Today, we officially released the first open source project I’ve been a significant contributor to. Chosen is a jQuery/Prototype plug-in for enhancing select boxes and I’m damn proud of it.
Chosen aims to solve a lot of the user experience issues presented by select boxes with way too many elements. It also aims to keep things easier for developers by relying on semantic markup and progressive enhancement. Double win.
After going through the experience of releasing an open source project, I’m disappointed it didn’t happen sooner. I used new tools and techniques (hello, CoffeeScript) through the process and the learning experience more than justified the time expenditure. I will definitely be going down this road again.
You can read more about Chosen on its project page or on the Harvest Blog.
