I often ask myself when will I ever stop referring to myself as a code newbie when I have been in the world of coding for the past 4 years. There are so many aspects to explore in this coding universe of ours that I find myself constantly being a newbie at something. I have decided to embark on a personal journey with open source and it feels completely new - I know nothing - Even after watching 10 tutorials. 4 months into my job as a low-code front end developer and I still feel like a newbie.
As I embark on this open source journey I hope you will enjoy the ride with me, and hopefully by the end of this year I will be blogging about how I successfully contributed to open source and put my name out there.
Top comments (1)
Congratulations on starting your open source journey!
Contributing to open-source projects allows you to solve different problems from day to day work. This broadens your mind as you work in different codebases and you see different coding approaches/solutions from other contributors in the open-source project.
When you contribute to open source you get in touch with other experienced people working on the project, giving you valuable insights and feedback, as well. Especially when you go through the code of projects with hundreds or even thousands of contributors, you can gain immense knowledge about best practices and code quality.
Plus, working on open-source software can improve other key skills aside from coding. It is an effective way to improve your communication and teamwork skills.
Find an open-source project you are passionate about. One of the advantages of open-source projects is you can start with beginner-level tasks and gradually progress to more complex ones. Start making contributions slowly to gain some confidence and understand the workflow in open source projects. Over time you will be able to make bigger contributions to the open source projects and learn more from them.
An added benefit of contributing to open source projects is that it helps you build your developer profile external to your company. Which is always useful for any future recruitment opportunities you may have.
All the best!