Open source with a cup of emojis
Helping someone with an error message and watching their eyes brighten when you’ve helped them resolve something often makes you have this sense of being a bit of a superhero. It’s an opportunity I occasionally get during my “Turing career” as a student for the past 9 months. Getting my first opportunity to contribute to an open source project should have brought me the same joy, but instead, it started off with a wave of panic even though I searched for open source projects for beginners. It’s a code base that I’ve never worked with before and that imposter syndrome kicks in at high level all because I’m nervous I’m going to break everything.
My first open source project that I was able to contribute to was the Rails Girls Summer of Code. They made it so wonderful to be a part of this project with their ❤️of emojis and amazing ReadMe (seriously, it’s incredible, look at this thing).
They needed help with changing the postal address from just one format field to multiple format fields just in case they get a user that has a “house behind the only bus stop in town” as an acceptable entry for “Street” 😂. Obviously they were exaggerating a bit, but some of the addresses that were in their database were very cryptic and it was hard to tell if the address was a regular local address or not, so they had to look them up manually and/or ask people, which was a bit of a time suck).

The postal_address was on the users table and they asked that I make the postal_address it’s own model with multiple fields such as street, zip, state so it would be easier to look up, as well as multiple fields for the users to enter in their information.

I’m not going to lie, this was hard. There was still a feeling of imposter syndrome that I wouldn’t know how to do this or I would mess everything up. But I started with a feature test because my instructor will tell you that you “always, always, always, write, tests, first (#AAAWTF). Then I created the table and let the error messages guide me all the way through to the end. All in all, it was one of the most wonderful superhero moments while being a student at Turing School of Software and Design.
My biggest advice — have fun contributing and being part of a small thing, because we all know that it’s the little things that make us happy. Closing scene of me shooting webs out of my wrists and swinging through the city (thanks spider-man).