This is a tale of a dream come true. This story starts way back in 2016. I was working as a software developer in one of the tech firms in Uganda at the time. I was not happy and had decided that I rather go back to school to pursue my Aeronautical Engineering career. I have always had a craving to contribute to open source but did not know where to start.

I kept reading people’s Github profiles in admiration of especially people that had repositories in the category of “Repositories they contribute to”. I wanted this on my profile too but did not know how to. I did not have many experienced developers in my circles atleast so this kind of information I did not get easily.

My future in open source presents limitless opportunities. There are many places you can be but you will never be every where.I will consistently continue to contribute to the projects I have started especially with ceph. I have this passion for PYPY and believe it has a whole future a head of it because it is solving a common problem. I will thefore keep sending some patches to pypy and qutebrowser.

Take every opportunity to invest in others

I heard about my first open source oportunity when I offered to teach ladies I had met while speaking some where. The morale of this is when you invest in others you are also indirectly opening up opportunities for yourself. If I had not met these ladies I probably wouldnt have known about RGSoC and in effect would not have began contributing to open source.

Contribute with a goal of bettering yourself and the project

I know people contribute to open source for many reasons. Others want to get hired, some want to be famous and others to make money from summer programs. These are all logical reasons however it is better you contribute to better yourself carreer wise. Open source gives us a platform to show case our skills as we also become better. It has the right kind of mentors to guide you in areas where you are not sure as you work on projects that are impacting many people.

The other thing you should aim at is bettering the projects you are working on. Many of the tools we use are open source and the danger is they only get better if people like us voluntarily send patches to them. I personally use open source tools from my operating system to development tools name it. If the tools we use do not get better,then we will not be productive. Rubygems.org got hacked and was down for over a week and during this time hundreds of ruby developers remembered to contribute. Let us not wait for such terrific times because even then we wont be useful as such emergencies need people that are farmiliar with the project.

Strive to learn from every failure you face

I have failed at many things in that I very much identify with failure. I mean we all fail many times. The difference between two people that fail is the ability to learn from their mistakes and not repeat them. Failure is not bad it depends on how you decide to view it. Failure is therefore a learning opportunity.

Keep trying

People always succeed after trying and failing a couple of times. If you have never failed then you have probably not tried enough and if you stop trying then you will not live to land on that sucess you evision. Some open source tasks require patience as you communicate and interact with people and some times the frustration builds up and makes you want to quit.

Keep calm and keep Koding

If I said the journey is smooth, it would be the lie of the century. Some reviews will frustrate you, the code will jam at times, you will burn the midnight candle at times, meet mean people. Always remember to keep calm and continue hacking. May you have the calmness to ignore the things that dont matter , the focus for things that matter and the ability to know the difference!!!

Good News: You never walk the Journey alone

Whatever you want to achieve will cost you a little patience and commitment.There are people that have walked this path.Many communities exist with people very willing to guide you on the open source journey. I have been previledged to know about the The Open source help community. A community full of individuals that want to help others to start contributing. You can reach any one there for help and join the monthly chats with experts that have walked the open source path.

Maintainers are always happy to guide new contributors. There may be those exaggarated scenarios where mentors are not friendly but these are few.You just need to find a project you want to contribute to and reach out to the maintainers to see what you can work on. The best project to work on is for a project you use because then you can easily even suggest improvements to it because you are a user.

See you at the top!!!!