Jumping into my first open source contribution

Jamison Ordway
Sep 2, 2018 · 4 min read
“group of people meeting” by rawpixel on Unsplash

For me, one of the most challenging aspects of transitioning into a new profession is becoming vulnerable enough to let other professionals look at my work. This was true when I was writing songs, it was true when I was laying out new curriculum, and it’s absolutely true with code.

At Turing School, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to do this — during code reviews, mock interviews, and group projects. But until this week, that was pretty much all done within the comfortable, safe, cozy walls of the basement/people-in-the-basement’s github repos.

During Module 4 of the program, students are assigned to a project called “House of Vars”, in which we find an open-source project and work towards contributing to it over the course of a few days. I was super excited when I found some open, beginner-friendly issues for Refuge Restrooms. This is a project that I really believe in, and one that I have followed for a while.

“gray valve against white wall” by Neil Cooper on Unsplash

I can’t recommend enough that people visit refugerestrooms.org in order to learn more about the project, but here’s a quick summary of the app from their website:

Refuge Restrooms is a web application that seeks to provide safe restroom access for transgender, intersex, and gender nonconforming individuals. Users can search for restrooms by proximity to a search location, add new restroom listings, as well as comment and rate existing listings.

We’re trans led and seek to create a community focused not only on finding existing safe restroom access, but also advocating for transgender, intersex, and gender nonconforming people’s safety.

There are lots of ways to help Refuge Restrooms with their mission, and contributing to the open-source code base happened to be aligned with my academic goals. So I hopped over to their repo and found an issue that seemed to be appropriate for my skill level:

The owners of the project were quick to get back to me and let me know who to contact for the specific issue I chose. While completing the task was fairly straightforward, cloning down a robust project and contributing to something this large was definitely a new experience for me. Getting the Docker container running on my local machine felt like a huge victory, since all of my previous experience with Docker has been purely experimental.

docker-compose up!

I also had the opportunity to explore S3 buckets with this project, since Heroku recommends hosting error pages this way and configuring the environment appropriately.

To see the full instructions for this process, visit https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/error-pages#customize-pages

The last thing that I’d like to speak on regarding this experience is the sheer amount of time that it took for me to feel like I understood the code base. The folks over at Refuge Restrooms do a great job of writing thorough documentation and maintaining excellent test coverage. However, for someone like me who has mostly worked on small personal projects, there’s a bit of a learning curve.

On the first day of work, I found myself thinking things like “Oh god, I don’t know anything. There’s no way I can wrap my head around this — do I know Rails at all?”

But reading code is a skill in and of itself, which takes consistent practice and a certain amount of grit. After looking through the file structure and checking out different aspects of the app in development mode, I took some notes and moved on, confident that my small changes wouldn’t break anything without my knowledge. (And, if they did, I would know how to retrace my steps!)

“MacBook Pro showing programming language” by Émile Perron on Unsplash

Contributing to open source projects is so rewarding, especially when the project is managed by amazing, driven people. I can’t wait to grow my open source portfolio!

I want to send a huge shoutout to Refuge Restrooms for the awesome work they’ve done. Click here if you would like to contribute on GitHub, or, if you would like to contribute to their database of restrooms, click here.

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