My first open source contribution

Cover image credit to @yancymin on unsplash

For a while I've traversed GitHub and come up with excuses as to why I couldn't step in and help with a particular project. Some of the more frequent ones were:

• I don't know that language well enough to be of any benefit.
• They already have so many smarter people working on this, how can I bring value?

These projects are more than just code - there's documentation, refactoring, testing...everything you would find in a normal project. Yesterday I finally stepped out of that comfort zone and took the plunge to make my first contribution - to dev.to!

No, I don't know the project very well (it has some great docs). No, I technically didn't write any code. In fact my contribution was fixing lint errors and warnings for a particular subfolder. Sounds pretty straight forward, right?

I was pretty nervous. Will it be approved? Did I do it right? I've fixed errors like this before...

Then, the email dropped in my inbox. I felt like a little kid again. My PR was approved!!

It felt great to reach outside of that comfort zone and make an impact - even if my contribution was small. If someone out there reading this has been nervous to take the plunge, do it! Its rewarding and the community is happy to help.