When I first ventured into the world of open source contributions, I was immediately overwhelmed. Until that point, I had not fully considered the all of the work that went into creating and maintaining the tools that I used in my projects every day.
All of the github issues, the comments, the waffle boards, and the first-timer tags made my head spin. I dug through repos looking for the just the right sized project with just the right amount of activity and just the right code base. Turns out, it didn’t exist.
I found myself missing the human aspect of development after a few hours of scanning projects. I wanted to talk to someone about why what they were building was important, what needed to be fixed on it and maybe even learn about who they were in the process. I returned to Google with a new search in mind: local open source. The first search result returned the Meetup page for Code for Denver and it just so happened that their next project night was the next day. I resolved to go and try to contribute meaningfully.
At the meeting, they had an onboard conversation for new attendees. They talked about the mission of Code for America and Code for Denver and gave us an overview of the different projects that were in development. I joined a Rails project focused on empowering apartment residents to request recycling in their units. They were working on building a feature that searched for a user’s apartment and popped a modal if it wasn’t found in the database. After two weeks of attending the project night, we were able to get a good PR in a make progress on the feature.
The people I was working with weren’t very familiar with Rails, but were all great programmers. We were able to have engaging conversations about the best way to solve problems and what their work or learning experiences were like. We had similar values and interests and I made a few friends just from the few times I’ve gone. I had such a positive experience and I can’t wait to go back.
The ethic of contributing to open source appeals to me, but I was overwhelmed by the process of finding the perfect project on GitHub. I wanted to be engaged with the technical community I was working in so I turned to my local community to find developers and projects that I connected with. I found this in the Code for Denver meet ups and I’m excited to continue working with them and developing projects that help the people of my city.