The beginning of my open source journey

Introduction

Hello there, my name is Cleo Buenaventura. Currently a 4th year Software Development student. I am primarily interested in web development, but I am also open to learning other fields to expand my knowledge. My interest in web development started during my 2nd year in the program when I first learned React, which gradually increased when I got the opportunity to develop a web app from scratch by myself during my co-op term.

Open source course

I saw that my school offers an open source course and wanted to take the opportunity to take it.

Firstly, the main reason for wanting to take this course was for obvious reasons. I have heard from peers and friends that open source contributions are valuable experience that could boost my resume. In a field where the number of developers is increasing, I have to take any advantage I could get to stay ahead.

Secondly, I want to use this opporunity for either expanding my knowledge by contributing into different open source projects other than web development or further increase my skills in web development by contributing into related projects.

Goals

I am hoping to learn the full process of contributing in an open source project and hoping that I can contribute something that will be useful for the community. If there's anything in this field that can make me feel accomplished, that would be seeing my work or contributions being used by other people, or finding it helpful in a way.

I am not 100% decided on what kinds of projects I want to work on, but I am planning on choosing an open source project where I can contribute to the web development community if I do decide to improve my skills in web development.

The project

For one of the projects I am interested in, I chose shadcn/ui. It is an open source project where customizable components can be used in apps. The project utilizes Radix UI and Tailwind CSS to make customizable components.

As a developer interested in web development that struggled with frontend particularly in css, I really find component libraries really helpful. It saves a lot of time especially with components that are easily customizable. It is also something that I have used myself when developing web apps, so it goes without saying that I am intrigued with the contributions in this project, and hopefully have a contribution of my own.