How I started my journey as a open source contributor

So finally after going through all this, it’s time to pen down my journey through this blog.

Being a second-year diploma electronics student at GURU NANAK INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY. In spite of being an electronics student, I have always been fascinated by computers and programming and then I started learning the Python programming language from the beginning of my 2nd semester. After that, i learned the Django framework and developed a couple of web apps by it, and throughout the journey, a guy called Rishi Mukherjee helped me a lot.

After some time I felt that I need to enhance my knowledge so that I can stand out from the crowd. So somewhere from the internet, I got to know about open source contribution where a person can contribute to a real-world project but I did not have much knowledge about what Open Source was and how everything functioned there. So I kept searching on Quora about open source contribution and found this answer, and got to know about this guy called Sayan Chowdhury. So I pinged him on Instagram and told him that I need some help about open source contribution. After that our discussion kept going on the messenger. On that point in time, my biggest problem was to find a good upstream python project to contribute. And he really helped me a lot in this case, he gave me a list of Mozilla project so that I choose one, and finally found pontoon a good upstream project to contribute.

After choosing a project I joined their IRC and my first goal was to create a local instance of the project, and for that part, I haven’t faced any problem because the project uses Docker and it is really easy to build a local instance of the project. And after a lot of discussion on the IRC with the mentors, I picked a bug and started working on it. And the day I made my first successful contribution to Pontoon. I made my first open source contribution on January 9, 2019.And after that no looking back, I contributed to this project for over 4 months.