This is a submission for the 2024 Hacktoberfest Writing challenge: Contributor Experience
Introduction
As A normal Android developer who barely finishes his tasks, I wasn't quite interested in open-source development. Still, I was always impressed with these great products built by tech giants, which were free to use. A friend of mine and a great engineer was a savvy open-source developer providing the community with free tools to use and supporting these projects to deliver the best quality and he was the inspiring model for me to deep dive into this world.
How I Knew Hacktoberfest?
Like Every day scrolling LinkedIn with no actual reason I found a random post talking about Hacktoberfest so I thought it would be a great start for me and I hopped in and registered.
How I Started Contributing?
At first I thought I couldn't make any PR that provides real value to these projects but after chatting with my friend I mentioned earlier he told me it is okay to add any simple small edit it is appreciated and most welcoming to the open source community , so is started looking for issues to work and it was all like building new google for me :D, until I found an opened issue to Detekt Project so I thought why not just cloned the project started looking for the bug and managed to fix it, after pushing the fix to the PR the maintainers were very welcoming and nice to me giving me some great feedback and tips,
but after all it was documentation bug, not the big one but this was the kick start.
How was the experience?
I managed to fix one issue related to the core project of Detekt adding new simple rule which was very cool for me as Detekt is Static code analysis for Kotlin and it is a well-known tool for Kotlin devs. It just gave me a great push to add more to the open-source world and give it more and started to work on other contributions.
At the end.
- You will learn soft and technical skills.
- You will add value to other projects.
- You will gain a reputation for your open-source contributions.
- The most important it is fun.
Top comments (1)
This is a great, relatable account of your journey into open source. Thanks for sharing your experience, it's inspiring to see how a simple "why not?" can lead to such rewarding contributions.