First things first, I’m a postgraduate student with absolutely no idea about OpenSource contributions. I’ve always used GitHub as a platform to dump all my codes!😬 Being an OpenSource newbie, here’s the story of my first PR..
It all began with the GirlScript Winter of Contributing 2021.. GWOC’21 aims to build large opensource content repository, and I had been selected as a ML supervisor. With this role comes the responsibility of supervising the contributors, verifying their contributions, merging their pull requests, etc. This got be utterly excited for OpenSource activities in general. I had also opted to participate as a contributor in GWOC’21. After few weeks of contributing and supervising, I had got a fairly good grasp on how OpenSource works. Henceforth with the confidence I’ve gained so far, I planned to join Hactoberfest 2021. Finally it was first of October, and there you go, the saga of confusion about picking the right project! I read a good amount of blogs and tweets to understand how I could pick a good beginner friendly project for Hacktoberfest. After quite some search, I came across a couple of such projects. I had to pick those projects which were using frameworks/languages like NodeJS, ReactJS or Python since I’m good at those. Finally, I chose a simple project that I came across as it was going to be my first contribution.
Huge shout-out to Nathan for creating a simple React.js project for people like me to get a taste of opensource world!😁They had created a project titled color-box and had opened an issue for aligning id to the center of the box.
All I had to do was put the ID within corresponding color boxes and align it to the center. Yes, it was that simple! 😄 I made necessary changes to the code and made a PR asap (I was too excited not to 😁). And the golden moment had arrived, when my PR got approved and merged! I was on cloud nine!!
I subsequently received this in my inbox..
And oh, my.. could I be more happier?! 🎉
That was it! In matter of weeks, I had gained enough confidence to begin my opensource journey😃! I’ve now started exploring more projects like AppWrite, Meshery, and so on…
Hacktoberfest is indeed an amazing initiative, and I encourage anyone with an interest in computer programming to try out opensource! Not only does it help us become skilled programmers, we might end up building amazing projects! No doubt, opensource communities are very welcoming and perfect place to hone our programming and communication skills. 😄
I’ve gathered some articles that you might find helpful in learning more about Hacktoberfest and Opensource :
- This twitter thread was written by my friend who’s an amazing Opensource evangelist himself : https://twitter.com/sudo_navendu/status/1446819951902281733
- Great repository to find beginner friendly opensource projects : https://github.com/mungell/awesome-for-beginners
- Beginners guide for opensource: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-contribute-to-open-source-projects-beginners-guide/
- Learn more about Hacktoberfest : https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/
