About seven years ago, I registered an account on GitHub. My handle is, just like my Hashnode handle, named wisn. To be exact, I registered there on July 13th, 2014. I mainly use my account to explore more about open-source projects. I began to give a star to a project that I personally like. I also began to watch some open source projects that I want to get updated with. For about two years, I'm a passive user there. It changed after I participated in an open-source competition back then.
In 2016, there is a competition for open-source contributions on the National level here in Indonesia. The competition's name is Besut Kode and is organized by Wikimedia Indonesia. At first, I was just curious. So, I decided to join the competition. I forgot the detail of the competition since it been a long time ago. However, I clearly remember that some of the tasks are to contribute to an open-source project. One of the tasks of course to send a pull request to an open-source project with a minimum stars count of 100 (if I remember correctly). Then, I began my hunt.
At the same time, I was in the middle of learning the Haskell programming language. So, I look to any repository that has Haskell on the language list. I finally found a quite easy open-source project to contribute to. It is ehotinger/hackerrank which is aligned with my goal to learn Haskell. Based on the repository description, it is a repository that contains "a collection of algorithms and solutions to problems in various languages from the site HackerRank." Then, I submitted my first pull request there. I added several solutions that are written in Haskell and I also add some solution explanations. Shortly, it finally got accepted and then got merged.
I opened my first pull request on October 3rd, 2016. It took me about two years to finally have some courage to contributes. At first, I somehow think that contributing to an open-source project is really scary. It turns out that I'm wrong. It was more like, depends on the maintainers. Some maintainers are friendly and some aren't. I'm quite lucky to get my first pull request got accepted since the maintainer (actually, he is the owner himself) is really friendly towards the potential contributors. I was also lucky that at that time I get to know about Besut Kode because if I don't, I won't be an open-source contributor by now. Although not as frequent as before, I do still contribute if I have the time.
Well, you see, I need something to drive my willingness of doing something. The story above is one of them. Another example is this blog post. I finally write a blog post again after so long because of the Open Source October that is hold by Hashnode. Since this is October, take the advantage of Hacktoberfest to encourage yourself to contributes to an open-source project. It is not as scary as you may think. As long as you don't spam a pull request, you will be fine!
That's it from me. See ya guys in the next post~
