Hello everyone!
Most of you might already know what open source software is and the community around it.
Today I would like to share my first step towards OSS where I participated in the Hacktoberfest event and was able to successfully submit 4 PRs that got approved 🚀🚀🚀🚀
My contributions and learnings
During the month, maintainers of OSS from all around the world tag issues as "hacktoberfest" and "good-first-issue". Most of the issues are beginner friendly, especially for first time contributors. This was the best time for me to start out and learn the about it.
So I found a project called ToolJet that signed up for Hacktoberfest and actively providing good first issues for contributors who are beginning.
ToolJet is basically an open-source low-code framework to build and deploy internal tools quickly without much effort from the engineering teams. It was using javascript and react where my area of interest lies.
I worked on fixing few good first issues that were opened by the maintainers.They were very responsive, reviewed the PRs carefully and always checked if changes align with their code standards. Even though my contributions weren't huge, having it merged gave me an immense confidence boost.
Checking to a whole new repo, reading through the code and figuring out things was great. While contributing to this repo, I additionally learnt about docker and how applications run on it.
Also, while preparing for interviews last month, I found the Freecodecamp developer quiz resources very useful. Javascript was my main area of focus, so I wanted to added few questions to the repo that didn't have few important topics like closures, event delegation etc. So opened a PR for the same.
Therefore, from a developer who was using numerous open source libraries in own projects to contributing to one of them feels awesome. I am so glad for choosing to participate and hope to continue on it.
Would love to take any suggestions related to OSS contributions.
Thanks!
Top comments (1)
I think that the most important tip is to not search for projects to contribute to. Only check project you use and like and try to contribute to them. If you like the project and don't know how to contribute with code you can contribute with documentation. Even writing tutorial or blog post how to use the project will be beneficial (my first contribution to OSS was writing an article how to extend the library, later I've put that information into a project Wiki). After creating an article you can add it to README, but first create an issue and ask maintainer if it's ok. Even if not the project will benefit, so probably at least you get some kind of thank you from maintainer.
On few of my project that had tutorial not written by me I always put them in README. Since people that find a project can quickly find the tutorial if he didn't came from that tutorial.