Becoming an Open Source Contributor
During the past months, I marked an important milestone in my software development career: contributing to a GitHub Open Source repository.
In this article, I will try to lay out what took me to code with Microsoft US engineers and I can confirm they really are the best in the world.
Hacktober Fest
Hacktober Fest is a digital event that takes place in October and tries to motivate developers to contribute to the Open Source.
Contributing to the Open Source on GitHub is a great way to show off your skills at whatever level of your career you find yourself in.
Many employers ask candidates for their GitHub profile during the hiring process and contributing to GitHub easily helps you to mark a tick on your list.
Step 1, Up For Grabs
Up For Grabs is a great website that will help you find your first issue.
I have been looking for contributing for a long time and I never had an understanding of how I would have found something to work on, who did I have to talk to etc.
Up For Grabs lists a lost of Git Hub issues and categorize them per language/technology involved so to help you find what you are looking for.
I personally started by looking something not too difficult just to get the grasp of how everything works.
My repository of choice was the Azure SDK for .NET from Microsoft.
My first task was to provide samples for the Azure.Identity SDK to be used together with Azure.Messaging.EventHubs SDK (currently released on NuGet at version 5.0.0-preview.6).
Here is the link to my first issue
Step 2, Ask if you can help
Once you identify an issue you think you can work on just be polite and ask if you can help.
Being my issue something asking for samples, I felt confident enough to throw myself in the ring without fully understanding what I needed to do.
As someone once said:
Fake it until you make it
I would definitely recommend if possible to understand your issue in depth before throwing you into something that might be too far away from your comfort zone.
Ultimately, is really up to you.
I found great engineers that really welcomed me and made my first contributions a great experience.
Have to say Microsoft’s engineers really are the best in the world.
A Journey of 8 Pull Requests Begins with a Single One
I have now merged 8 pull requests into the repo. It has been amazing.
I am a web developer, I never worked on an SDK before. It is great as you both have multi-threading/concurrency and web-development issues to solve.
I found very interesting facing the same tasks that Microsoft engineers do while seeing how they think and how they work.
I will list here some of my contributions (all made with the essential help of Jesse Squire):
Including URL to perform authentication
Samples, Client Secret Authentication
Summary
I hope this post inspired you to demand more from yourself.
Software Development is a fantastic discipline and I really have to thank Microsoft for allowing me the opportunity to code close with their best-kept secret: their developers.
Thank you a lot to Jesse Squire, I am not sure you will ever read this post but thank you it has been amazing coding with you.
