How Open-Source Contribution Helps to Become Good Developer
My Introduction
Hi, I’m Anubhav Singh an Open-Source Contributor, iOS developer and Technical Content writer. I’m a SIH(Smart India Hackathon) finalist and Former Student mentor of KWoC (IIT-KGP Kharagpur open-source society).
About Open-Source 🧐:
The term open source refers to something people can modify and share because its design is publicly accessible. Open source software is software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance.
I’m Start my journey in Open-Source with Hacktoberfest. I want to grab that beautiful Hacktoberfest T-shirt and stickers for my mac 😜. So I start contribution by watching some Youtube videos of git and how to select a normal organisation for contribution. After some efforts, I find some projects where contribution in code is easy that time my domain of work is Web-development.
How Open-Source helps 🤔?
Open Source helps a beginner developer with a lot of ways some are followings:-
Work in Community:- The open-source community is diverse and highly motivated. We’re sure you’ll be able to find someone who can help you (or that you can help) no matter what your interests are. And one of the main reasons to contribute to open-source is just that you understand how to work in the community.
Learning Basic/important things:- By work in Open-Source you learn so many things like when you commit codes in your repo no one take serious branch name and what I write in commit message and description of PR(Pull Request)and issues and even we can’t write proper comments on code but if you work in open-source community you have to take these things serious because you are not only who use these code, issues and PRs. It looks like very basic things but these basic things make the difference between a normal and good developer. I realised this when I started contributing to AnitaB.org which is one of the best organisations. My project mentor Ginny takes care a lot about these things. I can’t find any mentor like Ginny. She helps a lot in every respect. She even corrects my grammatical mistakes in the issue description. Can you believe that? That’s why I’m talking about my mentor like my mentor. A lot of mentors and admins are present to help you in communities so you can grow.
Understand others developers code: One of most important things you learn in open source is to understand others code. Understand others code is most difficult part when you are working as a team through the open source contribution you work with many contributors and to contribute you have to understand codes which is written by other contributors and with this process of contribution you get nice experience of understanding of others code which helps you a lot when you join any company in future.
How to Contribute in Open-Source:-Contribution doesn’t mean do changes in code, adding lines of codes in code base only. Contribution means any kind of work that helps the community to grow. Even propose ideas, helping contributors in any way is also a contribution.
Making Connections:-This is the best part of open-source. When you contribute to any projects you get in touch with some mind blowing personalities. Sometimes some of them become friends. One of my good friends pushpinder pal singh is an example.
