My First Contribution to Open Source

My first Contribution to Open source was to the Gradio Docs. I had no idea of the process of how to actually contribute to open source, but thankfully the greatest teacher in the world, Youtube was once again there for me.

After watching this video, I began my journey on solving my first issue. It was to fix the styling of the navbar on mobile and desktop. The main roadbump I ran into was getting the repo to start running. I was not used to using pnpm and was a bit confused on the project structure. After some hours, messing around looking at files I was able to get a local development environment running. I was so excited, I forgot I haven't even started to solve the issue yet.

The next challenge was finding what files to change, to fix the navbar issues and what exact changes to make. Gradio Docs also use tailwind, which I am experienced in so I was fairly confident in making any changes.

When I work on changes or new features, I focus on making the solution as simple and intuitive as possible. Sometimes this can take a bit longer, but the benefit is that it helps make the code more understandable for anyone who reads it.

After thinking of the most simple solution to the problem, I was ready to submit a Pull Request. To be honest I kind of overthought this part, my nerves got to me as it was my first time and I end up spending a while drafting the PR.

After I pushed the PR I was frantically checking my Github Notifications, waiting for a response from one of the maintainers, and sure enough I got one.

Since the changes were very simple the PR was approved and merged, and I felt a sense of accomplishment, knowing that I did something that I had never done before.

The best part about contributing to open source is seeing your name in the changelog. It feels nice knowing that you worked on something used by people all over the world.

Currently, I have been continuing to contribute to open source, being able to write pages for MDN and working on my company's open source, zero trust secrets management software Polykey.