Today marks a milestone in my development career. But before jump into it, I think it would make more sence to take a step back.
I’ve been coding for many years now starting out by knocking my head against my desk to understand things to becoming competant at coding and being able to help out members of my team. Although I have grown as a developer in terms of skill set and knowledge, one thing I had not done was contribute to open source projects.
Throughout the years, I had gained interest in contributing to open source once I started to use github to host a lot of my dotfiles . Using github helped me sync alot of my configurations between work and home, giving me a near seemless transfer between both environments.
It may have been out of fear and rejections, however I never got around to contribute to open source projects. The intention was there. The action wasn’t. I didn’t know where to start or how to go about it (even though I used github and bitbucket on a daily basis for personal projects).
Fast forward a couple of weeks ago, I made it my goal to try and contribute something to a project, even if it was something small. I started by looking at sites such as upforgrabs.com which hosts a list of github projects issues with labels such as ‘up for grabs’ or ’newbies’. This was my first introduction to projects which were actively looking for help from those who may no be familiar with the whole process.
I discovered Timegrid, a booking system created using Laravel (One of the core frameworks I use daily). This seemed like a good starting point as I felt there were some good UI issues which would be resolved. Although I didn’t see myself solving some of the issues within a short amount of time. I figured it would be good to try and contibute something.
After some tinkering, I came up with some changes which would enhance users experience by removing some confusion. To my surprise, my work was appreciated by the owner of the repo and later merged to the master branch. I was very pleased.
If you are just like me, knowing you have knowledge, wanting to contribute and not knowing where to start, I urge you to just go for it. As advised online, “it’s not as bad as you think”. If things didn’t go as well, I’m sure that I still would have learnt from the experience and pushed on to contibute in some way.
Peace out people!