Excited much? Yes I am. I have wanted to contribute to an open source project for a really, really long time. I am unreasonably psyched about the whole experience right now.
Trigger warning: I am going to be unironically enthusiastic. Sorry.
Here is how I did the do
It was unbelievably easy. I noticed in the github news stream that one of
my friends had starred a project, and it looked kind of cool. The project
was micahflee/onionshare and I
liked it because I like Tor and I think
onionshare is awesome and I can absolutely see someone needing to use it.
By the way, I can’t overemphasize how important Tor is. You can totally
help out even if you just have some extra
cash to throw at it.
So I looked at the open issues. At the time there were two similar issues, one
about Localization and
a pull request to Add Spanish translations.
That’s when I realised “I can read in other languages, okay, not at all well,
but I can definately do it!” So I cloned micahflee/onionshare. The code
was very nice, I had no trouble figuring out what I would have to do, I could
see that the i18n strings were loaded from a json file.
I spent the next about an hour researching what I hoped were good translations by typing what I thought was the correct phrasing into google.fr, and checking how well it matched what French speakers actually use on message boards, in blogs and so on. It was a bit of a challenge to match the style of language in the English translation, and I think I sucked pretty hard.
I forked micahflee/onionshare to create my own repo, and cloned it. On my
machine I edited the strings.json file with my lovingly collected French
words, staged, committed and pushed.
Then I got stage fright. My translations are all wrong. The patch is totally trivial. I’m not even French. But I really wanted to contribute something, and that pushed me to create the pull request. It sounds like a little thing, but I suppose it’s a bit like being new at school, it feels like there is a lot of pressure to make a good impression. It is a little thing, but it was actually the hardest part.
It took maybe an hour before my pull request was merged, and it was pretty awesome. Unlike when I commit code at work, I got this:
Thanks so much.
Somebody immediately gave a shit. That felt good.
Why so long?
I’ve been a software engineer for two years, and it’s taken me all this time to make a contribution. I think gaining the ability to contribute has been a combination of confidence that I have something to contribute, finding a project I strongly identify with, and a bunch of great blogs and other sources of engouragement online…
Here are a bunch of great blogs and resources
How to be an open source gardener
The big takeaway from this was that you don’t need to be a huge personality to start making contributions to open source. This was a major motivator.
Watching the codefirefox videos made me think “I could totally contribute to firefox”, and if I could do that I could do anything. I could be like superman (⌥). But with typing. The videos are a really good introduction to some common open source processes with what I guess is just common sense advice.
Julia Evans is just infectiously enthusiastic about programming. I both read the blog and watched the video about her writing an operating system in rust and it made me want to get involved with awesome projects and people. There are a bunch of people on Twitter who are extremely motivational, I’m sure I could compile a list, but the rust talk was kind of a big deal.
Why do?
Here are the positives from my tiny little open source experience and why I would do it again:
- I’m getting brand new skills, I am a Level 1 Open Source Contributor (chaotic good)
- I feel unreasonably good about helping out
- It made me nervous, but I did it anyway and that felt like a little win
- Github is gaming me (with contribution counts and buttons to click and oh the commit chart) I CAN BEAT YOU GITHUB!
- There is a lot less pressure on me now. The ’look at some issues, say hi to some dudes, submit a patch’ hoopla is no longer completely foreign
I’m sure there are lots of other good reasons too. There were no downsides.
It was awesome!