Open standards are your friends

Chances are your project works or interacts with a standard protocol or two.

Standards are our friends. Standardized and properly documented protocols make a foundation for a world of software to interoperate.

Protocols and standards are not created out of vacuum or invented by magicians just guessing how things should be done. They are created and updated by real world persons such as yourself. Standards also have bugs and flaws just like your software projects do. Standards also need to get those issues filed and subsequently addressed in a future update.

By getting involved in the standardization process of how protocols you work with are made you can not only learn faster and better how your project should interact and function to be a good citizen but you can also provide good feedback and help polish and build better protocol specifications going forward. It is a two-way street and we all benefit with more ecosystem members reaching out and contributing.

If your project is working within Internet protocols, I strongly encourage you to at least casually keep up with the work IETF is doing within the area of your interest.

Non-open standards

Conversely, standards that are proprietary and are hidden behind paywalls are evil and we are all better off trying to not get involved with those.