My Open Source Journey

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Hello everyone, my name is Santosh Yadav and I want to share my Open Source journey with everyone.

Introduction

I am working as a developer from the last 10.5 years, started my career as a .Net developer back in 2008. I was not even aware of what open source means when I completed my education, and there was no one to even guide me about it. I struggled to get a good job where I can get some work to do, in 2011 I joined a startup and it gave me a lot of opportunities to learn and work on latest technologies. I was enjoying everything about my role, but it became repetitive and the organization doesn't want to change to new technologies and finally, in 2016 I decided to leave that job. While working there I thought of starting my blog, but if you have worked in a startup you may be aware, you generally don't get enough time for such kinds of stuff, working over weekends being in office for 3-4 days was really common.

Introduction to Open Source

It was during my time with the startup I heard Open Source for the first time, and yes I feel bad about it. It was my CTO who asked us to check out NodeJS and Typescript back in 2012, but I was too arrogant to listen to him, as I liked .Net very much and was scared or ignorant to try something new, and imagined it is for extraordinary developers, doubting my ability.

Around 2015 one of my close friend decided to leave the job, he is the best developer I have worked with and learned a lot from him, he is even active in the Open Source community you can follow Imran Momin he mostly works on Hangfire and Azure and has few packages on NuGet as well. While leaving for Canada he also asked me to do open source contribution, but as usual, I was scared as I thought it's not my cup of tea.

Moving to Pune

After changing my job in 2016, I came to Pune and within a few months, I realized I have a lot of free time here, in my earlier job I used to work 12 hrs minimum, sometimes more than 80 hours a week. Working 9 hours a day and 45 hours per week was something I was doing after 5 years. I realized I wanted to write a blog post and even had a few lines written on CodeProject in 2015, I took this opportunity and wrote my first blog post on http://santoshyadavblog.com/.

Teaching

In early 2017 I got the opportunity to teach AngularJS in LIPS India Pune institute, and I grabbed this opportunity and started teaching AngularJS in Jan 2017. After completing the first batch we moved onto Angular 4 and I still teach at the same institute till now. In 2017 I also had a short stint with Edureka as Online Trainer for Angular and NodeJS, I decide to stop than in Feb 2018, as was not getting enough time for self-improvement.

A Bad Phase

Life is not a smooth ride and you get a reality check sometime, 2018 was not that good for me, I worked on a course for Angular, Javascript and CSS for one of the guy who wanted to start his own setup for training and I did invest my 4 months, and finally he didn't bother to pay me as agreed and I got demotivated, We (me and my wife) got really bad news my daughter got diagnosed with TB. I was scared, but my doc said nothing to worry about she will be cured, and she is in perfect condition now, completed the medication in Jun this year.

ngIndia

With almost a year doing nothing I came to know about #ngIndia, I had never attended or heard about any tech conferences in India before and wanted to work with the community in Angular space, I decided to book my tickets in November 2018, and was really excited to be there. At #ngIndia I got the opportunity to meet so many great speakers, I met Vikram You can follow him on Twitter from Angular Team, I asked him I want to contribute to Angular, but don't have any idea how to do it. He said you can write blog posts, create videos help people on StackOverflow or raise a PR to fix some issues, in Angular or related projects. I thought I am already doing teaching and had recorded a course which unfortunately didn't get released. So I decided to focus on contributing to Angular as another way to help the community. Thanks a lot to Dhananjay Kumar for organizing it, and in the year 2020 it is happening again, and I am already excited to attend it.

After ngIndia

After coming back from #ngIndia, I started looking for issues in the Angular repository but my fear of contributing to Open Source came back to haunt me. I thought again and realized a few months ago one of my friend had informed me about #NgRx and Jesse Sanders spoke about it at #ngIndia.

Journey with NgRx

While looking for issues in NgRx I came across an issue related to schematics, at #ngIndia Stanimira Vlaeva gave an awesome speech about schematics, so I took the opportunity and picked up the issue and on Feb 28 opened my First PR for NgRx. And the team is so awesome at NgRx Wes and Tim they helped me a lot. Within a month I learned so much and my confidence was on another level, I was not scared anymore, I had buried my fear and was another person.

Contribution to Angular

One of my personal milestones was to reach into Top 100 contributors by June 2019, I decided to take an issue related to docs and raised my first PR on March 18, and by June 2019 I made to the top 100 list and not going to stop anytime soon.

NgConf 2019

In May 2019 ng-conf 2019 happened, Brandon Roberts during his speech on NgRx gave the list of community contributors, and that was moment i still cherish and biggest achievement so far in my life, I was there 2nd in the list, I felt like I am dreaming, it was late night in India, and I was working on one of the tasks of NgRx, I couldn't control my emotions and cried for 5 mins, thank god my wife and daughter were asleep i cried like a kid.

Meetup and Events

I decided to attend more meetups to meet the community members, and in June 2019 started my own Meetup. Also during this period I also got the chance to meet many awesome community members.

ng-srilanka

I will be speaking at ng-Srilanka which is happening in 14th September 2019, and will be speaking on the very same topic from where I started my Open Source Journey NgRx. At ng-Srilanka I will be sharing the stage with Pankaj, Nishu and Anchal they were the speakers at #ngIndia 2019, and I am honored to share the stage with them.

DotNetTricks

When I started my career, I had read a lot of blogs from Shailendra Chauhan and I am a big fan of his work, as I have resolved many issues in .Net by going through his blogs. He gave me the opportunity to work with him on his new platform where I have already completed 2 courses MEAN Stack Hands-On Project and Angular Unit Testing

Angular In Depth

It was while working on one of the tasks in NgRx Tim, Wes and Brandon thought the implementation is good enough to be converted into a blog. And I had not written anything from last 3-4 months, so I went ahead wrote that article and published and got a good response. You can refer to the blog on Angular Elements with NgRx and wrote another one on Angular 8

My Open source Projects

Motivated by what I have already done, I decided to start a few Open Source Project my Self. My first project was a Simple Website to collate all Custom Builders

You can check out both the projects on GitHub

Final words

If you are a scared guy like me and want to start your open source journey don't hesitate to connect with me on Twitter. Also, don't be scare Open Source Community is very supportive, its like family.