I was in my third year. I was doing great at learning React.js. During the learning phase, I learned a lot of things but I felt like something was missing from the learning that was really. All the things that I learned throughout my college days and the React.js that I was learning was not helping me to work on some real-time projects. The real-time projects are different there we have to work on its speed, test cases, integration tests, etc. These things were never taught in my college. Also, I observed that it was a really important aspect that needed to be considered while running a huge project.
As I was saying earlier I felt that something was missing from the learning process. One day my friend Rishabh told me about Open-Source projects and companies. He explained to me how these companies work and also how to contribute to them. When he told me everything I got excited and went to Github. I made a GitHub account when I was in coding blocks studying Django Framework. Well, After the course got finished I never touched my Github account. After like 1 year I opened my Github account. It was empty I had no contributions in the last year. I felt that I must start pushing/posting my work on Github. I was filled with motivation and wanted to do some work. Also, I was excited about Open-Source. I went to Mozilla Page on Github. There were like 2000+ repositories. I had no idea where should I start from. My python skills were of a decent level so I started looking for python repositories and I found Mozilla/Addons-Server. I felt really lucky when I found it as the addons-server worked on Django which I learned a few months back. There were many issues in the repositories. I knew that fixing one of them would get me 1 contribution in Mozilla. I started looking into the issues there were many easy and difficult issues. To differentiate those issues there were various labels like component:aAPI, contrib: welcome, etc. I was new there so contrib: welcome seemed like a valid option. I found various issues then I decided to take the first issue in the contrib: welcome label. I commented on the issue “Please. Can I work on this? Someone said yes you can work on it.
He explained to me where I had to write the code. I begin working on it. First, I had to set up the project locally on my device. I read the documentation of addons-server. It took me some time understanding as I had to learn about docker first because of the reason that every large scale project use docker. When everything was ready I started working on the issues. Same day, I came up with the solution to the issue.I had a bit of problem using Github. I forgot how it worked then I brushed up my knowledge on Github. I really enjoyed the process till now because everything that I was doing was going to affect a real project that is live. I proceeded and made a Pull Request. After a few hours, a member of Mozilla reviewed my pull request. He told me that the test cases are failing because you used a wrong symbol. He told me to change that as I was really excited I made the requested changes in like 2 minutes of the comment.
After that, the best thing happened that the Pull request got merged and everyone thanked me for it. Everyone said thanks to a newbie who just contributed. I was really happy as I was new there but still, they gave me a lot of appreciation. It felt like I had done something great.
I didn’t know who “caitmuenster” was she just commented on my pull request and said thanks for the patch. On some research, I found she was the head of the addons-server team and she said Thanks to me. I felt real joy at that moment because everyone on the team was noticing my work. This gave me a lot of motivation to work in Open-Source projects.
Also, She told me she was going to vouch for me on Mozillians.org. I was filled with joy at that moment and created my account immediately asked her to vouch. She vouched for me. Well, I was on another level when I got vouched by a person who was head of addons-server.
My name was also added to their Contrib Wiki Page. I felt really great about that. I was given recognition by such a big company. My actions were acknowledged by everyone in the community.
This was the story of my first contribution to open source. After this I continued to contribute to open-source I do it every day. I feel really great and joyous when I contribute to Open-Source Projects. To this date, I have made many contributions to various organization like Intel, Adobe, Workday, Yelp and many more. I will continue contributing to Open-Source.
The PP Life 