Why Open Source Makes Dev Work Easier: Connor Meny’s Insights
From drones to AI assistants, Connor Meny’s OpenTeams internship shows how open source removes barriers and unlocks real developer creativity.
Connor Meny
There are moments in your career when you realize something that reaffirms your belief in the path you’ve chosen. For many developers, it’s rarely a major product launch or a financial milestone. More often, it’s about solving difficult problems and building useful tools together. It’s about community.
Connor Meny is a recent Cal Poly grad, OpenTeams intern, and a firsthand testament to the power of communities. His successful internship as a young engineer is a story about how a global community of collaborators can build something that empowers anyone, anywhere to create amazing things.
The huge barrier, he discovered, for developers, is the practical challenge of getting systems to communicate—a problem that open communities are uniquely positioned to solve together.
OpenTeams sat down with him to hear his discoveries and experience.
Open Source Internship: From Drones to Digital Assistants
Connor’s internship wasn’t a single, monolithic project. Like many real-world engineering sprints, it was an agile journey that adapted to the needs of the organization. He started in drone AI research.
For his first week, he was tasked with exploring PX4, an open source flight control software for drones that provides both a software suite and hardware specifications. This wasn’t an easy assignment. He dove into a complex system, researching how a custom drone could be built from individual components or purchased as a complete kit. His objective was to assess what the PX4 platform could offer—a classic case of exploratory engineering.
What’s fascinating here is that Connor wasn’t just reading documentation. He was actively testing the software and running virtual simulations without needing the physical hardware—a testament to the robustness of the PX4 development environment. He explored the entire stack, from the QGroundControl software, which acts as a virtual cockpit on his computer, to the PX4 Autopilot firmware, the drone’s “brain,” and the middleware that connects it all to external systems like the Robot Operating System (ROS), a popular framework for programming robots.
The key, he discovered, was how easily the different parts of the system worked together. Connor was already familiar with the Robot Operating System (ROS) from his university work in robotics. He found that connecting PX4 to ROS was surprisingly straightforward.
"I only had to make a few adjustments and it just all worked," he recalled. "I could get the tutorials running... I could just solely focus on just writing out a bunch of ROS code to actually do autonomous applications for a drone and not have to worry about everything working together."
This seamless integration is a core goal of the open source community. When developers don’t have to spend their time acting as digital plumbers, forcing different systems to talk to each other, it “has to unleash a lot of creativity,” as Connor put it. Innovators are free to focus on bigger problems, like developing drones for search-and-rescue missions in hazardous environments or creating autonomous navigation systems.
The Universal Dev Challenge: Making Systems Communicate
The value of this interoperability became even clearer in Connor’s next project: building an AI agent to schedule meetings by automatically checking Google Calendars.
Initially, he built a version that worked in a simple text-based terminal. But when he tried to adapt it for a popular, proprietary messaging app, he ran into a common engineering roadblock. The way the app handles messages—where each one triggers a separate event—clashed with his initial design.
"Not every framework or package you get just magically works altogether," Connor explained. "You have to figure out what works well with what."
His experience highlights a recurring problem in software development: systems that don’t speak to each other. The struggle to connect disparate frameworks, APIs, and platforms is a daily reality for engineers.
Interoperability and How Open Source Solves It
On the surface, these are two interesting but distinct engineering projects. One is about hardware and robotics; the other is about APIs and business automation. But if you look closer, Connor’s story is unified by a single, powerful theme that lies at the very heart of software development: interoperability. It’s the challenge of making disparate systems talk to each other.
This theme provides the most important insight from his entire experience.
During his work with the PX4 drone platform, Connor had an “aha!” moment. He found that connecting the complex PX4 software suite to ROS was “really easy.” With a few adjustments, everything worked. He could get the tutorials running and immediately start thinking about higher-level applications like autonomous movement, rather than getting bogged down in low-level integration details. He described it as nearly seamless. That easy integration saves developers time and allows them to focus on more creative problems, a key goal of a well-designed open source project.
“There’s big companies doing drone-related projects,” Connor said. “It’s good to see that there is an open source alternative that is capable of competing.”
It was this positive experience that framed his biggest takeaway from the drone project: we now have an open source alternative that is capable enough to compete with big proprietary companies in the drone space.
Open source can deliver the same power as big proprietary systems with an easier, developer-first experience.
This is a key insight. Open source is not just a free version of commercial software; it is a fundamentally different paradigm. A global community of collaborators, working in the open, can build something so robust and well-integrated that it empowers anyone, anywhere, to innovate and beat black box systems.
Connor Meny
Connor Meny is a recent Cal Poly graduate with a passion for robotics and AI who interned at OpenTeams. During his internship, he worked on both open source drone software and an AI-powered Google Calendar agent.