Beginning My Open Source Journey
My curiosity for open source has vastly increased within the last year as I listen to a few podcasts talk about what it entails, the experience and the community oriented mindset. Most of the podcasts interviewed speakers of varied experience ranging from students to professionals. The idea of helping design new processes or fix technicals issue that will be deployed to production, without necessarily being an employee was fascinating. So I decided to add open source to my memory-log of things to try.
This month, I checked off open source from my log through an opportunity that came by attending the Virtual 2020 Grace Hopper Celebration. The conference has a day called Open Source Day (OSD) where individuals are introduced to open source and how to get started by working on beginner-friendly issues. Participants had the option to choose from various projects and the maintainers (mentors) of some of the projects were on stand-by to provide support. Although the conference was virtual this year, the OSD experience was very rewarding, thanks to the amazing mentors!
In OSD, we were also informed about Hacktoberfest, an initiation where individuals can sign up to complete 4 pull requests during the month of October. Apart from the experience one will gain, participants who complete the requirement will also receive a Hacktoberfest shirt!
If you’ve been thinking about becoming an open source contributor and are a bit unsure where to start, below are a few websites that provide a list of beginner-friendly issues you can start with. There are definitely more complex issues but a beginner-friendly one can ease you into open source especially if you are not familiar with git and github.
Apart from solving the specific issue, I will say being able to get the application running on my local machine has also been a rewarding experience. One of the issues I am currently working on requires using AWS lambdas and state machines, and setting up my environment gave me a detailed exposure to AWS. The other great thing is once you have your local or cloud environment setup for the specific project, you can pick up other issues on the project without having to go through a detailed environment set up again. Also, you can always subscribe to the repo and get notified once new issues are added.
Remember that if you want to participate in Hacktoberfest, it is not too late! Find a beginner project to contribute to and start coding! Below is the link to the hacktoberfest website for more details on projects that qualify. Happy open sourcing!
