Prior to founding Wednesday, both Mac (CTO @Wednesday) and Ali (CEO @Wednesday), were open-source contributors and maintainers way before they started Wednesday. They had an urge to give back to the community that had given us so much. So, we were maintaining and contributing to multiple open-source projects, as well as contributing to various private repositories used in different product ecosystems for the engagements we were part of.

Library development is a fascinating process that involves solving various use cases through the creation of easy-to-understand and extendable tools for developers. The development journey starts with people getting onboarded with a template (React,Node,etc.), and as they contribute to the ecosystem, the templates continue to improve. We have created an environment where everyone can contribute and make a difference. We encourage proposing and implementing changes to improve the codebase. We believe in giving back to the community through contributions to various platforms like Sequelize, AWS Amplify, and GitHub. This culture of innovation has greatly enhanced our codebase.

Across all these initiatives, what's remained common is carving out a certain amount of time within the workday itself to give back. One-time efforts aren't enough; the goal is to maintain involvement and create lasting change. To truly own these projects, we must consistently contribute and make an impact.

We've been able to do that because we've worked towards carving out some time within the workday and the workweek to contribute to these endeavors. We've created a culture where everyone is very open to learning and sharing, making horizontal learning very easy. We've got company-wide sharing sessions with Wednesday Wisdom and smaller, close-group sharing sessions with Brown Bag Lunches, where you can talk about innovation within a certain set of peers.