Behind the scenes
Hello, open source community!
2.9.2020
Our ERP system and online shop are far from being prefabricated, purchased solutions. They’re 100% developed in-house. About time to make some of the programs available to the public. Digitec Galaxus is joining the open source community.
It's impossible to imagine Digitec Galaxus without automated processes. Therefore, our engineering team is working on automating tasks that don't require manual intervention, such as sending invoices, reserving products in the warehouse or the order process. Most of these programs can only be used by employees. This type of software is referred to as Closed Source.
The opposite is called Open Source. Open-source software code is publicly available and can be edited by anyone. Well-known Open Source examples are, among others, the operating system Android, which was developed mainly for mobile phones, or Firefox, the Internet browser by Mozilla. We also use many open-source projects, which run in the background when you visit our online shops.
Now we've decided to share some of our software with the public. Depending on the licence model, which is defined for each program, every person is allowed to use or modify these applications. And that's not all. If you find a bug in a program or want to add useful functionality to the software, please send us your changes. If it's an adjustment that's in line with our vision, we will integrate it, helping all users benefit from the change one person made. Everyone in our engineering crew has the opportunity to share a program with you. Before the program is published, we check if it's suitable for the public.
Collaboration on GitHub
We chose GitHub as our collaboration platform. GitHub makes sure that you can view and download our source code and that you can easily suggest modifications. We've made our first open source programs available on the Digitec Galaxus GitHub.
Galaxus.Functional
Philipp Kiener and I have worked hard to make a central part of our software, one that's used by many Digitec Galaxus teams, available to you. Galaxus.Functional is a function library on GitHub that allows you to develop more explicit and robust programs in C#. Galaxus.Functional is a compromise between the object-oriented and functional programming paradigms, which is especially useful for C# developers who are new to functional programming.
Galaxus.Functional 3.0.0 can now be found on the official NuGet Feed.
Join us!
Feel free to check out our GitHub, post issues or suggest code via pull requests. We're looking forward to collaborating with you and hope you have fun working on your own projects.
While our GitHub allows you to get a glimpse of our work, we won't reveal the really exciting projects to the public. Apply for one of our engineering job offers to enjoy a deep dive into the world of e-commerce.
Noël Widmer
Senior Software Engineer
Noel.Widmer@digitecgalaxus.chNoël studied Software Engineering at Juventus Technickerschule HF Zurich and has been a software engineer since 2010. He has been working at Digitec Galaxus since 2017 and is committed to ensuring that you can experience the best possible product data. In his spare time, he's currently developing a first-person puzzle game.
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