How I started contributing to open source projects.

Ahmed Waleed in Multan, Pakistan

Sun May 26 2019

If you are a person like me who's a bit of a nerd and has gained some experience as a programmer, you might be thinking about entering the Open Source world, after all, that's where all the professional developers are. However, you might not be clear on what exactly would you get out of it. And that's the main motive behind this article, to share with you, with the help of my personal experiences, the several reasons why anyone would want to spend time on contributing to open source projects.

You want to have a strong portfolio that you can mention on your job application or your resume.
Or maybe you want to get actively involved in the open source world.
You have probably learned a lot about design pattern, solid principles, best practices, anti-patterns, etc. and you think now is the time to put those concepts in practice.
Another reason could be that you are using some open source code in your daily projects and you wish to add new functionality or improvements to that framework or library which thousands of others might be using.

These might be the reasons you want to consider investing your time and efforts in contributing to open source projects.

# Story time

Now it's time to share my story so how and for what reason I got involved in this. I am a web developer for almost 3 years now. I am always ready to adopt new technologies and eager to learn and implement new things and best practices.

Recently I was reviewing attended.io which is an open source project to organize events and get feedback from attendees. While reviewing, I found some issues in the project. Without giving it a second thought, I decided to fix those issues and instantly began working on that. After writing the code, I forked the repo and submitted a pull request. To my utmost surprise, the pull request got merged only after a few minutes. Hurrah!! It felt wonderful! That was my first contribution to an open source project.

After a few days, I contributed to another project (Google time zone) by Spatie. After making only two contributions, I got so much confidence and I wanted to contribute more and more.

# Lesson learned

But let me tell you a not-so-pleasant story here. It's perfectly possible that sometimes you'll spend a lot of time working on a particular feature only to see that your pull request was rejected by the maintainer. And that surely causes frustration. I know that because the same thing happened to me when I submitted my third contribution and it got rejected because for some reason the maintainer didn't want that feature to be added into the project. There are several other reasons due to which contributions get rejected and are worth explaining in another post.

If you are interested in viewing my previous contributions, please see links below.

# Contributions

# Projects:

# Contributions:

Thanks for reading, that was my story of how I started contributing to open source projects, I would love to hear yours, you can follow me on Twitter.