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What was your first ever contribution to Open Source?

Christian Vasquez on May 22, 2018

I'll start! My first Pull Request that was ever merged was a set of translations for one of Francisco Franco's Android apps from English to Spanis...

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Eric Curtin • May 23 '18

My first contribution was a micro-optimisation to the Linux kernel, I was fairly new to git and was a beginner in kernel development. Unfortunately it caused a bit of fuss, it was one of the most talked about threads that month, but not because it was ground breaking. In the end Linus Torvalds responded and got it merged. Learnt a lot in the process:

lkml.org/lkml/2015/9/22/662

Brodan • Sep 5 '18

Holy crap, that's so awesome. The Linux kernal to me is probably the most intimidating thing I could think of when considering what to contribute to. I can't believe your first pull request ever was merged and you got a response from Linus himself.

Congrats!

Philly • May 24 '18

The first time I contributed to open source was during one of GitHub's Hacktoberfests. I've always wanted to contribute to open source, but was way too afraid. Though, I did wanna have that Hacktoberfest T-Shirt so, so badly. 😅
I was deep-diving into GitHub Repos looking for non-coding issues (as I was still too afraid to do coding contributions that time) like ... ehm yeah, crazy. 😅 In the end, I spend to whole days doing the german translation for Cboard (a web application for children and adults with speech and language impairment, aiding communication with pictures and text-to-speech).

And yep, I eventually got that shirt - which I'm still very proud of, and which will always be reminiscent of my first contribution ever. 😅 🧡

Douglas McKechie • May 22 '18

My first contribution to open source was literally a 1 character typo fix in the documentation for the SilverStripe framework/cms.

Ben Halpern • May 22 '18

github.com/facebook/react/pull/5287

Updated a conference page on the React website, which was part of the main repo at the time.

My first OSS PR was 2015 and I've only made a couple of tiny contributions since then. I've "contributed" in other ways but still haven't made open source code contributions a big part of my life.

Dian Fay • May 23 '18

I found and supplied patches for a couple of major bugs preventing set operations (UNION, EXCEPT, and INTERSECT) from working in the JCR-SQL query parser for ModeShape, a Java content repository.

Dustin King • May 22 '18 • Edited

I submitted a patch to sqlany-django, the Django database backend (aka driver) for Sybase SQLAnywhere. The database backend hadn't updated for the latest version of Django (1.4 at the time, I think), so that's what it was for. I think it was accepted as is, along with one for 1.3 that somebody had already submitted.

It was hosted on Google Code at the time.

Dylan Paulus • May 23 '18

github.com/react-cosmos/react-cosm...

Found some bugs, and added a 404 page to React Cosmos. It's great feeling to get any amount of code into an OSS project!

Brett Stevenson • May 23 '18

Early in my programming education, I was learning Java and looking for a good project to work on to improve my knowledge so I decided to create a basic text editor and used RSyntaxTextArea to provide syntax-highlighting. Though as a Sublime Text user, I was disappointed to find that there wasn't a Monokai theme.

I then noticed that there was an issue on the project repo that had similarly requested that a Monokai theme be added, so I decided to make my own and submitted a pull request.

Nick Taylor • May 23 '18

My first PR ws to a project that was using a framework that I was trying to learn, Meteor. It was a fun project called Push Pickup. The premise was to organize pick up games of basketball and some other sports. You can see my horrible first PR here.

Want to see what your first PR was? Check out firstpr.me.

Yury • May 23 '18

I only have one pull request that was fixing an issue I had with database migration framework. It wasn't merged though because the issue turned out not so easy to reproduce and I didn't have the time to find out what's so special about my configuration

Trevor Giddings • May 23 '18

Fixed a bug in DataNucleus (an ORM) where the method for converting a type to one the database can use didn't actually do said converting.

github.com/datanucleus/datanucleus...

Ben Sinclair • Jul 20 '18

I think I submitted a test case to Django at a hack day a few years ago. Part of the process that day was to demonstrate how easy it is to just jump in and get involved by picking up some of the low-hanging-fruit tickets.

Karl Heinz Marbaise • May 23 '18

I've taken a look and the earliest contribution I could find: (OMG ...astonished myself):

sourceware.org/svn/gcc/tags/new_ia...

Sun Jun 15 14:37:58 1997  Karl Berry  <karl@cs.umb.edu>

* doc/texinfo.texi (Command List): Various commands missing or
    erroneous.
From: Karl_Heinz_Marbaise@p69.ks.fido.de.

* makeinfo/makeinfo.c: Oops, failed to break out of loop.

* util/texindex.c: Use <getopt.h> not "getopt.h".

* All source files: Merge gettext changes from Karl E.;
his ChangeLog entries below.

This means this contribution is more than 20 years old...with a strange email address: Karl_Heinz_Marbaise@p69.ks.fido.de.

At this time CVS (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrent_V...) was used. At that time pull request didn't even exist ;-)

Guillaume Martigny • May 23 '18

I add a listener to the Escape key to close options panel on PiskelApp. It was my first of a few contributions to this awesome project.

github.com/piskelapp/piskel/pull/396

pranay rauthu • May 24 '18

My first pull request was to a project which generates code snippets for popular code editors. I have added a keyboard shortcut to insert placeholders.