There are a few developers out there such as Christian Heilmann and Paul Irish who are constantly making outstanding contributions to our community. What I love about these guys is that they make you feel like you too are capable of hacking together great things, and that someone else out there is grateful you didn’t keep your little creations to yourself. They’re helping evolve the web by developing tools and libraries that make our work a lot easier, creating richer experiences and showing us how we can harness web standards to bring these experiences to as many people as possible. Yesterday, a website launched to let us know that we’re invited to the party too…

Move the Web Forward is a new resource designed to help the rest of us give back to the web platform, and its surrounding ecosystem. It gathers together many excellent resources, describing how to contribute to the HTML/CSS specs, how to use and help refine the latest browser developments, and explains why you should be sharing your discoveries with everyone else.

It’s a short document (you can read the whole thing in under ten minutes), but it serves as a launchpad into a wealth of information you can spend hours/days poring over. I had a flick through it and couldn’t help but feel a calling similar to the one felt by Jake in the Blues Brothers. I just kept thinking the blog … the Blog … THE BLOG! It wasn’t a religious experience (I’m a grown-up after all), but an inspiring one, nonetheless.

I’m not much of a writer, but I do like having a space to collect my thoughts and let them distill into ideas I can build things with - the only difference is that I’ll now be doing it publicly. I’ll probably use this space for sharing the problems I run into, and my attempts at solving them. If something in this blog could save you an afternoon of scratching your head, I’ll have justified its existence.

I’m no longer content with tuning into The Changelog, Twitter & my RSS feeds to check out all the cool shit people have been building. I want to be a part of that. I have to be a part of that. The work we do is a joy because of the people that keep pushing the boundaries of what’s possible on the web, and to not give back to this incredible community would be a crime.

I’ve dabbled with open source a bit in the past, pushing little things back into the tools I use (such as ACE), and making some of my creations available on GitHub, but it’s been close to a year now since I really put anything out there. That situation is going to change. Today.