Since I embarked on my software engineering journey, I have always wanted to be contribute to open source projects. The issue is that I did not know how and where to start. Fortunately I recently applied for an outreachy internship. I got past the first stage of application and joined the contribution stage. Over the course of last month, we were tasked with selecting the projects we wanted to contribute to and record contributions. I can say choosing the right project was not that easy for me since I found that each project had skills I have always wanted to learn or practice. I used the first week of the contribution phase just reading through the projects for each company and familiarizing myself with the required tech stack.
I finally settled on a project by Wikimedia foundation. This project not only attracted me but I realized that the objectives for this community really aligned with my passions. Their main goal was to migrate their software from java to python using django framework. This means that the code had to be rewritten from scratch. Starting something from scratch is something I have always loved since this means I will fully participate in the development and thus offering immense learning opportunities for me.
What stood out the most during this stage was the support I got from Wikimedia community. From the onset, we were given tasks to solve so as to get familiar with the tech stack we were going to use. A part from the task, we were provided with a tutorial that served as an introduction to Django especially for beginners who had little or no knowledge of Django. Solving the tasks and going through the tutorials helped me get a clear picture of what I was going to do. The availability of mentors and other community members to respond to our questions and give us directions whenever we got stuck was also quite amazing. I got to interact with people from various backgrounds and even made friends within the short period. Through this I was able to improve my Django skills and even got the opportunity to help my fellow interns when they got stuck. This is exactly what we call collaboration. Something I have always wanted to be part of.
To anyone who has never contributed to open source, I advise you to start now. There are many learning opportunities and the good thing is that you will not do it alone. I am still learning more about open source and I hope to contribute to more communities in future.
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