For a long time I have been reluctant to actively contribute to an open source project. I thought it would be rather complicated and demanding – and that I didn't have the knowledge or skills for it or at the very least that they (the project team) weren't waiting for me.
In December 2021, I decided to have a serious input into the Dapr.io project – and now finally to determine how it works and whether it is really that complicated. In this session I want to tell you about my experiences. How Fork, Clone, Branch, Push (and PR) is the rhythm of contributing to an open source project and how you do that (these are all Git actions against GitHub repositories). How to learn how such a project functions and how to connect to it; which tools are needed, which communication channels are used. I tell how the standards of the project – largely automatically enforced – help me to become a better software engineer, with an eye for readability and testability of the code.
How the review process is quite exciting once you have offered your contribution. And how the final "merge to master" of my contribution and then the actual release (Dapr 1.6 contains my first contribution) are nice milestones.
I hope to motivate participants in this session to also take the step yourself and contribute to an open source project in the form of issues or samples, documentation or code. It's valuable to the community and the specific project and I think it's definitely a valuable experience for the "contributer". I looked up to it and now that I've done it gives me confidence – and it tastes like more (I could still use some help with the work on Dapr.io, by the way).