Last year I had the opportunity to work with some amazing developers from Amazon. I got to be part of the Open Source Contributor Initiative program which is an Open Source program supported & managed by Amazon. The main focus of the program is Amazon OpenSearch which is an Open Source data analytics platform by Amazon. In this post I will share my experience from getting selected to understanding how to work with large code bases & making a few contributions. I mostly didn't get to write about my work as I was still working to make more contributions. So here's my journey.
On September 2023 I decided I would seriously start contributing to Open Source. I have been part of the AWS Cloud Captains program & one day saw an event on the Amazon Open-Search Cohort. I was quite curious.
Around that same time I had started to gain momentum on @quine_sh improving my Open Source ranking & had also made some notable contributions to meshery.io & codecademy docs. So I applied out on a whim. Honestly didn't expect to get selected since 2023 was the first time I started contributing to Open Source. But then I received the mail!
I was thrilled to be among the selected people. And so began my 12-week journey with Amazon Open-Search.
All mentors & program managers mentioned in this post are Amazon employees who were in charge of the OpenSearch Project.
History of the program
Earlier in 2023, from March 1st to May 15th, they launched the College Contributor Initiative (CCI), which was a pilot of OSCI. Well over 100 students participated in CCI, contributing an impressive 150 pull requests and generating 275 issues. Many participants have continued to work on the project, with multiple becoming maintainers.
Iskander who mainly gave us all the updates on the program. David who cheerfully started the program is a really cool dude.
We completed the 3-day on-boarding sessions & got to work!
It was my first time working on such a big code-base with such professionals. I was very inspired by my mentors. We were assigned mentors based on our interests. There are many repos part of the Open Search Project. I selected to work on OpenSearch-Dashboards & OUI front-end components.
Mentors:
Josh Romero
Matt Provost
Anan Zhuang
They are all amazing mentors, I specially got inspired by Matt's experience of being a self-taught software developer. Josh helped me understand many things about github that I didn't know much about before hand which was very helpful. Anan also helped with understanding issues. Josh is super composed & calm in tackling any issue which was great.
I started attending the community calls every Thursday. At first even running the code base on my local machine was a hassle. But as I kept attending more meetings I got to understand more of the codebase.
I mainly worked on 2 Repositories
OpenSearch-Dashboards, which is a Dashboard web app for Data Analytics
& the OUI which is the front-end components library for Open-Search.
As a beginner I learned quite a lot.
My Contributions in Open-Search Dashboard:
- https://github.com/opensearch-project/OpenSearch-Dashboards/pulls/ShatilKhan
- https://github.com/opensearch-project/OpenSearch-Dashboards/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3AShatilKhan+is%3Aclosed
My Contributions on OUI:
- https://github.com/opensearch-project/oui/pulls/ShatilKhan
- https://github.com/opensearch-project/oui/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3AShatilKhan+is%3Aclosed
All though they weren't any advanced contributions they taught me a lot about making quality contributions, how to make your contributions better. I wrote another blog from my learnings through this here :
Feel free to give it a read.
In total I made about 6-7 PRs for the program. Ultimately I learned how to work in large groups to maintain & resolve issues in a large code-base. I am still actively part of the open-search community & learning more. I hope I can make good use of the knowledge I've gained here. Part of why I'm writing this post now is because I was mainly occupied with work & didn't have the time to properly write as the program was still going.
Here's some helpful links if you're interested in Opensearch
The Official OpenSearch Project Github
OpenSearch Project · GitHub
OpenSearch is a community-driven, Apache 2.0-licensed open source search and analytics suite that makes it easy to ingest, search, visualize, and analyze data. - OpenSearch Project
github.com
The official site for Open Source Contributor Initiative
https://opensearch.org/blog/Receive-mentorship-from-Amazon-engineers-and-accelerate-your-career-in-Tech/
The program usually runs twice a year. Applications open usually in July & September. Keep an eye on their official site for updates. It's good to mention that the program is not stipend but meant for beginners , so it's a good starting point.
If you're interested in learning about AWS Cloud , you can check out my other blog about it:
Happy Coding!
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