Why you should contribute to Opensource | My OpenCode19 Experience

Like most of you, I am a lazy person unwilling to complete my own work on time, yet I ask you to contribute to opensource. Why you might ask, here is my experience of OpenCode19.

What is OpenCode19?

OpenCode was started with the aim to get more people interested in open source.

Aim:

Awareness : Increase awareness about the world of open source.

GitHub : Get people started with Git and GitHub.

Community Building: Build a community of developers.

Improve Skills: Help mentors to improve their guiding skills.

Source: https://opencodeiiita.github.io/

The beginning:

I was advised by my seniors to participate in opencode19, I was already interested in development but open source was a very vague idea for me back then. I never thought I would contribute to opensource anytime soon. Even if I wanted to, using git and Github was not a very easy task for me, I took hours to figure out the ‘git things’. So, the start was not really a piece of cake. I had to spent a lot of my time configuring git and making perfect pull requests. I won’t be exaggerating if I said I had to spend more time to get things right with git than actually solving the issue.

Above all Barriers

It took me days, but once I was comfortable with the basics of opensource, The things were quite easy then, Solving each issue helped me boost my confidence.

Mentors at opencode played a really important role here, they helped me solve my problems,and advised me on better coding practices. I was forced to learn new languages and try new things. This opened the doors towards new technologies and was added to my experience.

As it is evident from my contributions in the start I had less contributions, with time I was comfortable using the Git and GitHub and things were easier then.

Why opensource?

You would normally hire a tutor or get a course on udemy to learn new languages and coding practices, but if anyone of you have done it might have realised it never gave you the confidence or experience to work on something big. Through Opensource you can contribute your code directly to production, this is what counts as experience ‘writing code that is actually being used’.

It is good that you make your own projects, but if you are not working in team the only advice that you get in through blog posts online, I won’t deny that leads to your growth but when some expert directly looks into your code and advices you to make any changes for better, that sure has some other impact.

How did opencode help me?

As I have said earlier to contribute to opensource you need to cross some initial barriers, through open code I was able to solve most of them. I learned and worked on the few parts of node js and python and learned quite a lot there. What you know only gets better, in my case I was familiar with php yet I found there are parts I didn’t explore.

Follow ahead:

My GitHub: https://github.com/thesmallstar
I also want to thank the mentors of OpenCode19
Check them here:

Also take a look at this cool app I made during opencode: https://www.truetricks.com/todo/

Opencode 19 leaderboard: https://opencode19.netlify.com/