A first step in the Open Source Wonderland ✩
“Software built on pride and love of subject is superior to software built for profit.” — Ravi Simhambhatla, CIO, Virgin America
This quote beautifully explains what lies at the core of the open source development in a few words. Open source software development for me is all of the great minds coming together and building something great for the community. When I first got introduced with this concept, it took a bit time for the young and naive mind of mine to take that in, some of the silly questions in my mind were:
- So anybody can see the code and anybody can go in and contribute?
- How does it work considering there are so many developers in this world?
- Why would you wanna do that? Putting time in for free?
These questions stayed in my mind 🤷🏽♂️ until I decided to actually look for answers to these and the only way to find out was diving into open source!
So as a mandatory first step for every new thing nowadays, I googled
“How to contribute to Open Source?”
I did find some good resources explaining a bit how it works, but I was still overwhelmed with all of this tbh. How do I find what to work on? Oh, these projects have such a big code-base, I need time to understand it and finally, the biggest question do I even know that much to be able to contribute?😢
I was about to give up, but then a part of me realized that answers to these questions are never gonna show up on their own, if I really want the answers, I need to do what everyone suggests to do.
I gathered the courage to ask for help, but the dilemma was to WHOM? At the moment, I only knew and followed one guy who was an active contributor in Open Source, the guy whose work I have been following since he helped a stranger(me) in the library and introduced me to the concept of debugging when I was fairly new to development.
I decided to reach out Sean Prashad. And oh boy, does this guy ever let you get disappointed 🤩? Almost instantly he replied, and we set up a Skype call over the weekend. He walked me through the whole process patiently and answered every dumb question of me. He introduced me to a number of new things, some of those being:
- How to find an issue to work on?
- How to use labels and that lovely “Good First Issue” label.
- How do you ask if the issue is available and if you can work on it?
Most importantly, he helped me realize and understand how welcoming and great this open source community is. Irrespective of your skill level, if you are ready to learn and work, this community has so much to offer. I was so surprised to see how such great minds were available to help and mentor others. I guess this is the core beauty of the Open Source community and the sense of being part of something this big and amazing is out of this world.
I consider this introduction of mine to Open Source as my first step into this wonderland, which eventually led to my first Pull Request 🥳, and I feel that asking for help to a right person(Sean Prashad in my case) was really critical in developing my mindset towards this community.
So if anyone reading my blabber is also confused and wants to get started, guys reach out, there are a lot of great people who are more than happy to help you out, no one bites here, TRUST ME 🙃!
It was this message on LinkedIn:
which eventually resulted in this :
During this small time for which I have been a part of this great community, I have got familiar with some great people like Sean Prashad, Kumar McMillan , David Humphrey and am really grateful to them and all of those who are making this community so great ❤ and hope one day, I will be able to give back to this Open Source Community too. 🙃
