My First Open Source Contribution

For a long time, I thought about contributing to Open Source, but I felt I did not know where to start. As a software engineer, I wanted to learn and build a portfolio of work through contributing to Open Source.

Back in December 2017, I got the word of 24 Pull Requests, an initiative with a Christmas feel to it, where you can contribute to open source projects during the month of December.

When I found about this, I decided to look into it and see if I could contribute. To start I thought about contributing with a “low hanging fruit” sort of issue. Even though my main interest was in coding, I wanted to start with the documentation type of contribution. So I looked into projects made of markdown files and found fvcproductions/hire-me which is about providing resources and advice for people looking for jobs, such as interview tips, job boards, and other types of resources.

So after looking into this project I noticed that there was a job board that I knew that was not there so I saw an opportunity to contribute.

Next, I read the contribution guidelines which were very simple. The steps provided in this project guidelines were: 1. fork repository; 2. read contribution guidelines; 3. add my name to the credits section; 4. Open Pull Request; 5. Get pull request approved 🎉

So after I forked the repository, I added my changes and my name to the credits in the README, and submitted a Pull Request. Here’s my pull request #9!

Some days after the maintainer of the repository merged my PR and thanked me for my contribution! I was so happy that I finally managed to do my first open source contribution after so much time delaying it. After this moment, I knew the basics of an open source workflow and I could apply to other contributions.

Have you ever contributed to Open Source? If not, I hope this inspires you to get started :)