My First Contribution to Open Source

Overview

I was really interested in Open source and the opportunities it gives to students and people of every age. I started my open-source journey in January 2023 when I found a Post on Twitter about Linkfree, an open-source alternative to Linktree created by Eddie Jaoude's EddieHub.

EddieHub is a community of amazing like-minded people contributing to open source, The motto of EddieHub is "Collaboration First, Code Second".

This amazing community helped me get started in Open source and I did my first Contribution ever, I even did another one in the same project fixing one spelling error in the documentation. 😎

How I came to know about Open Source?

Actually, this journey started when I started watching Kunal Kushwaha on YouTube and he encouraged every student to contribute to Open-source. I watched many videos of Kunal and realised his life changed because of his dedication towards hard work and open-source. He himself says that open source has changed his life.

How did I do it?

I opened the tweet by Eddie Jaoude about LinkFree and saw this opportunity to contribute to this project by creating my profile using a .json file (Chore: Profile addition)

I opened the documentation and started following it, the documentation was really easy to follow and start. I did whatever was asked in the documentation, and raised a PR and Now I have to wait for the PR to get merged.

PR = Pull request

You learn when you make mistakes

I waited and waited for 2 days and realised nothing has changed. I immediately came to a realisation something is wrong and that I have done my contribution the wrong way.

I started googling things but google wasn't that helpful in this problem. I started reading the documentation again and realised my silly mistake. I also found a small spelling error in the Documentation which I later fixed.

The documentation says Click compare across forks and you will see 4 drop downs. Base repo, Base repo branch, Your repo, Your repo branch.

1. Base repo is the destination in which the PR must be pushed, In this case, it must be EddieHubCommunity/LinkFree

2. The base repository branch is the destination branch in which the PR will be merged. main

3. Your repository is the repo from which the PR is raised, that is yourusername/LinkFree in this case. (source repo)

4. Your repo branch is the branch that will be merged into the main branch. In this case, it was the default name that is yourusername-patch-1 (source branch)

One thing you will notice is that when you click on the text saying compare all forks it shows you all these option buttons which are dropdowns with different options but by default, it is set to yourusername/repo-which-you-forked

So In my case, my base repo (destination) was set to shubhsharma19/LinkFree and this was done by default by GitHub, I forgot to change it and I merged it in my own forked repo. This is why no one was able to see my PR. 🤣

When I realised this silly mistake, I fixed it and raised another PR again this time into the EddieHubCommunity/LinkFree and finally, I saw some tests happening and then successful messages.

The next minute I saw a message from a Reviewer and He said your code need to be fixed with a ,

I realised what mistake I had made and fixed it as well, and the next day the PR got merged. 🥂

Open Source is for Everyone!

I saw this notification the next day - Merged into the main

This feeling was amazing, It was my first ever contribution to a proper big project. I can't describe in words how good it felt.

No matter what your age, no matter what background you come from Open Source is for everyone and everyone can contribute to a project making it better and better.

The next day I woke up and raised another PR for the Documentation Spelling error.

It got merged as well. Now I knew how I can start contributing. 🎉

This was the start of my journey into open-source.

Open Source is not only meant for Programmers and Developers.

Opensource welcomes:

• Documentation changes

• Changes in designs

• Running tests

• Fixing bugs and Errors

• Reviews of code

If you want to start contributing to open-source 👉 https://linkfree.eddiehub.io/

I am on my way to contributing more and more. 🎉😄

Thank you for reading this Blog!