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Eddie Hale
Eddie Hale

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My first open source contribution

Cover image credit to @yancymin on unsplash

For a while I've traversed GitHub and come up with excuses as to why I couldn't step in and help with a particular project. Some of the more frequent ones were:

  • I don't know that language well enough to be of any benefit.
  • They already have so many smarter people working on this, how can I bring value?

These projects are more than just code - there's documentation, refactoring, testing...everything you would find in a normal project. Yesterday I finally stepped out of that comfort zone and took the plunge to make my first contribution - to dev.to!

No, I don't know the project very well (it has some great docs). No, I technically didn't write any code. In fact my contribution was fixing lint errors and warnings for a particular subfolder. Sounds pretty straight forward, right?

I was pretty nervous. Will it be approved? Did I do it right? I've fixed errors like this before...

Then, the email dropped in my inbox. I felt like a little kid again. My PR was approved!!

It felt great to reach outside of that comfort zone and make an impact - even if my contribution was small. If someone out there reading this has been nervous to take the plunge, do it! Its rewarding and the community is happy to help.

Top comments (1)

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Jess Lee

Woohooo!!

No, I don't know the project very well (it has some great docs)

Also thanks ☺️ that actually means a lot. We're really trying to improve documentation.