I always thought open source would be a scary world and the start of it was. I was shown a nice little website named First Timers Only ( https://www.firsttimersonly.com/ ), and this was my entry point. This lead me to the UpForGrabs page and I started filtering by what I knew, .NET. (Yes I skipped first contributions, if I don’t know how to do a pull request after working in industry for a year, I may be in the wrong profession)
I found many projects I recognized very quickly, Chocolatey CLI, Fluent NHibernate, Fake It Easy and even Mono! All of the previously mentioned are massive, well known projects and if I’m honest, I thought I didn’t stand a chance with any of the issues found on their github repositories.
Very quickly, my want to add to open source started to dwindle due to my belief in my lack of skill. So where did my first OS PR go? It went to a small start up project call Spotify-NetStandard ( https://github.com/RoguePlanetoid/Spotify-NetStandard ). Whilst I have no immediate plans for the library, I saw a talk on this and saw parts of the API I thought could be improved and so I sat down, and worked it out.
Forking the repository was easy, making my work was also easy (well apart from the XML documentation part, I’ve not done that before) but I think the biggest and hardest step is actually submitting the PR. Many thoughts went through my head, worrying that the Library maintainer would not like the code, that I hadn’t done the documentation correctly, all manner of things. But I put it in anyway.
Getting it accepted and merged in is a massive achievement for me and is my first public commit outside of test projects and it made me feel extremely happy (think the usual kid in a candy shop simile). It also gave me an understanding as to what will drive me in future Open Source projects: doing work for features that I believe I would use. It is a big driving force as you want the feature there so you can use it in the next project or because you genuinely think it will be useful to both yourself and others. This has re-sparked my want to get further into the world of open source and work my way to bigger projects I find myself using everyday.
If you take one thing from this, it’s give it a try. If you’re scared of the big projects, go to meetups, meet other developers, they may have projects you can contribute to or even try starting your own. That’s my next stage, so wish me luck.
Thanks for reading.