My first contribution to… this blog!

Welcome to my brand new blog! I’m excited to launch this space where I’ll be documenting my experiences contributing to Open Source projects.

I’ve always been fascinated by the collaborative spirit of the OSS world, and I’m really looking forward to share my experiences. I plan to find and contribute to OSS projects of all kinds and document here how a first contribution to this project went for me.

What you can expect to find

  • Project Spotlights: I’ll tell you how I found each project, what initially drew me in, and the overall goals of the community.
  • What to Work On: I’ll detail the specific tasks or areas I identified for contribution – whether it’s bug fixes, documentation improvements, or new feature explorations.
  • Walkthroughs: I’ll walk you through the entire process
  • Lessons Learned: I’ll share what I learned along the way

First contribution for staring out

Now my first Challenge for this blog was to find a Framework and a Place for it. It was after some thoughts clear to me that I will use a static Framework and deploy it via github pages. After some research I have found multiple options to aid me there, including Hugo (see here https://github.com/gohugoio/) . Their repositories at least contained the label “good first issue” so I thought why not kick it of here with a Contribution to the framework I will use. (See those issues here https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aopen%20label%3AGoodFirstIssue) . Also they have a CONTRIBUTING.md that walks you through on how and what to contribute. (https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md) . My wish is though that the hugo project would also continue to use the label for good first issue, as it seems unused in recent times.

What I worked On:

I did not want to work on any of the above Issues though and hence started to look in the other issues for something I could easily do and found it with this small CI issue here:

https://github.com/gohugoio/hugoThemesSiteBuilder/issues/287

As a solution was clear to me I just picked it. This would already be my first advice: You do not need to start big, a small issue works, and also look in places like CI, docs, test and so on.

Next I created a fork from the repositories, as I would have no write rights on the repository. After then implementing I committed my changes and took the commit message guidelines (https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#git-commit-message-guidelines ) into consideration.

Then it was time to push my changes and with that I was ready for a Pull Request: https://github.com/gohugoio/hugoThemesSiteBuilder/pull/613

After waiting under an hour my changes were already merged and are now in with https://github.com/gohugoio/hugoThemesSiteBuilder/commit/77430ff24c4a011a1f02f1f03e1271b09be30cb0 . That was fast, but of course do not be put off if it is not always that fast if you are contributing to a project.

Final thoughts:

I’m really excited to continue this blog and share more about my first Contributions to all kind of projects. I’d love to hear from you!

  • What projects are you interested in seeing me contribute to?
  • Do you have any tips for new contributors?
  • Let me know your thoughts on this post!