How did I fall in the open source world…and that was a nice thing!
Normally every end of the year I write a list of things I would like to do in the upcoming year. Last year wasn’t different. Part of my list contained:
- Learn Typescript ✅
- Fill up my Git with projects
- Learn more about Reason and GraphQL
- Try to read all interesting medium’s articles I got (God! They are so many)
- Start writing my articles
As you may know the life is full of surprises and something that was not on my list happened: I became an Open Source maintainer! 🤘
Cool.. but how did that happen?
… Well, I usually attend the JS / React Meetups in my city (beloved Vienna) and one day I met a nice guy called Juan Picado. He is one of the core developers of a project called Verdaccio. We talked a lot about the project and how it’s growing…
As I am a very curious person, I decided to know more about it and do some research. I was surprised when I saw that many great dev tools are using Verdaccio. (Ex: NodeSouce, pnpm, SheetJs, Mozilla Neutrino…)
ok…and?
Juan sent me an email with the step-by-step how to set up the project (kinda cake recipe) and have it up and running! That was easy…till I saw the code.And now? Being honest, I didn’t understand anything! I think most beginners in the Open Source world feel the same way. Did you?
After trying to understand what Verdaccio is and it’s code, I saw that the UI had a lot to improve, it was when I decided to help them out. After all I am a Front-end developer. 👩💻
How did I get started?
I started with some simple tasks (issues) and doing code review. So when I started to understand how things work, I got more involved. After I started to create my own tasks of things I would like to correct / improve…and of course work on those tasks.
Why I am enjoying it very much?
. I am in constant contact with many skilled developers. Verdaccio, for example, has a chat in ‘Discord App’, where we discuss about many things.
. It’s nice when you create a PR (Pull Request) and you get many constructive feedback. Even if you think you already know a lot, you can always learn something new. Being a developer (Junior, Pleno, Senior) is being a student for life. Be humble!
. I am facing unexpected requirements/bugs of things I don’t have experience and I am learning a lot. Ex: In Verdaccio we use Flow for type checking and although it is very similar to Typescript, it has its peculiarities. I didn’t have experience with Flow, but now I have! 👌
. I’m helping other developers improve their code. When you do code review or when you create a PR, you will share your thoughts, experience for the purpose of finding better solutions for our needs. Believe me it’s a good feeling. 😊
. Not an easy task, but I am learning to manage my time to work on the project.
. Work remotely! Is there anything better?
.It is very gratifying to see the application growing and see people using things you helped to improve.
What comes next?
At the moment I am working on new requirements for Verdaccio 4.x 🎉
- Improve header ✅
- Move search to header ✅
- Add autocomplete when searching ✅
- Introduce emotion (it was my choice, I am loving it) ✅
- Routers
- i18n (in progress)
- Fix minor issues (in progress)
- Refactor UI Tests
- Create user profile with the ‘change password’ field
- Refactor details page
and…
I will help Juan give our first talk at the “React Vienna Meetup” in January 2019. I need to confess, I’m a little nervous about that. 😄 If you are interested and want to know more about the project, you are welcome to join us!
Final thoughts
I know there are many articles about ‘How do I start to work on an Open Source project’ and things like that, but I really hope you enjoyed my experience!
Before I forget…Want to part of an amazing team and help us to improve the App? Please get in touch with us!
Back to my list:
- Learn Typescript ✅
- Fill up my Git with projects (hmm..next?)
- Learn more about GraphQL (in process)
- Learn more about Reason (in process)
- Try to read all interesting medium’s articles I got (in process)
- Start writing my articles ✅ (Finally 🙌)
You can see..I got my ‘JavaScript Fatigue’ organised.
Many Thanks! Muito Obrigada! Vielen Dank!
