In 2022 I discovered many technologies and tried so many new things. I moved from an interest in machine learning to web development and then realized that I hated the frontend dev and decided to stick with backend development. Among all of that, the exciting thing I discovered was open-source. I used to hear people talking about it. I never dig into it, but this year "I mean 2022," I found out about that. One issue I was dealing with last year was whether I needed an internship or not. (Looking for your 1st meaningful software internship is probably the hardest thing I did last year. I may write another article to talk about that.) While waiting to find an internship, I started contributing to open-source, and it's probably one of the best financial decisions I made this year ( I wasn't earning money ), but contributing to open-source helped me level up my skills. It gave me the feeling of a working environment while working on projects maintained by hundreds of engineers worldwide. I worked with many fantastic engineers who gave me helpful feedback on my code. People often complain about how hard it is to contribute to open-source projects and that it is challenging to solve issues.
Still, they should stop finding stupid excuses and start contributing. Open source is an opportunity a learn new technologies. My first contribution was writing a unit test with 100% coverage. They were nests at the backend, I didn't know anything about NestJS, but I did it. I went through the code base and spent some time understanding it, figuring out how to implement it, and did it. My first pull request wasn't accepted immediately, and when everything was fine, I failed to pass the CI/CD check, but I did it at the end of the day. If you want to contribute, do it. There are multiple youtube videos out there that can help make your first contribution. Therefore, after reading, you can start looking for an open-source project that fits your interest and begin contributing.
After finding the right project, before making any contribution, always go through the documentation first. It has everything you need to help you start and understand how the project is structured. Usually, people don't even read the documentation and come later to ask stupid questions or see their pull requests being rejected because it only fits some of the requirements. One thing I learned in open-source is that communication is the key but don't ask stupid questions and don't expect to find every answer to your questions or someone to come to tell you what to do and how to implement it. Most of the time, you must figure out things on your own, and that's how you learn. Don't pretend if you don't know something that you don't know. Contributing to an open-source project is worthier than personal projects and gives you many opportunities you can't imagine.