“All contributions are welcome”.

No, this is not a message that’s similar to a consolation prize or participation trophy for us millenials.

Rather, this goes to show that there are rich, diverse and multitudinous ways to contribute to the open-source world and that no work is unnecessary. Scouring through some “open-source project” in a new grad’s Github profile will tell you that not enough projects out there have documentation. How devastating would it be if an open source project would fall before it begins to fly just because nobody outside the seed team can understand the codebase? Documentation is just one facet of this rich tradition of helping software grow.

Breakfast

Although this is not my first time contributing to open source software, this semester brings about new challenges, teammates, and motivations. While I contributed code to a massive open source project before, this time I am going to focus more on community and mentorship. We may not always consider the first touch we have with the project – communicating with the maintainers – to be significant enough to be considered a contribution, but I assure you it is just as important as churning out code. From that nervous first hi in the project IRC to saying thank you after the Pull Request is accepted is important in keeping this tradition of passing on the understanding of the codebase from generation to generation.

Since open source communities are usually tight-knit communities, a wrong step in communication could cause one’s absolutely brilliant and clever contribution to be rejected. Yes, I have seen it happen before.

Lunch

There is no doubt that I will try and contribute code – that is my passion as a computer science student. Well, whatever is left of that passion anyway. I have been in severe burnout since Spring of 2018. But, what is the best cure of burnout in times like these? It depends. For me, I find confidence when I browse through open source software projects that are as old as me or even older. Projects like Firefox and the Rust programming language inspire me to keep pushing boundaries and learn even more. Open source is many things and one of them is motivation. I hate to sound like a broken record but seeing how so many people come together to build something that outcompetes proprietary software is truly inspiring.

But I must think of my own limitations; my lunch money. There is no doubt, that communities like these welcome novice contributors like me with wide, open arms. I, however, need to realize that my time is running out. Between a short semester, searching for a summer internship, interviewing for them, polishing resumes after a rejection, maintaining social relationships, studying, organizing a budding club and doing this is a strenuous task. Not to mention, showering on time. Nevertheless, I have decided to commit (pardon the pun) to this undertaking. It is time for me to come home and come clean.

Dinner Dash

Taking everything into consideration, I quickly realized that it is important for me to contribute to a medium sized project. How we determine what that is, however, will come later. Working in very small projects denies me the chance to be part of a buzzing community and learning from the codebase, studying it, understanding it, consuming it. It becomes less of open source development and more of product development which, frankly, I have done too many times in preceding semesters. A large and complex project, on the other hand, would severely impede my progress, overwhelm me, and – perhaps, worst of all – exacerbate my burnout. Keeping track of so many variables (both literally and figuratively) would cripple me.

The best meals are the ones that satisfy your hunger without overstuffing.