Assessing Strengths and Weaknesses

Hello, so for this week we were asked to consider what our strengths and weaknesses are in regards to contributing to open source and what do we need to learn the most in order to be able to contribute to open source projects. So at this point in time I really don’t know what my strengths or weaknesses are because I have seen/done much in open source to know what I’m capable of or not capable of. But I do know that I don’t really feel confident enough to write and contribute code to the project base because of my limited knowledge and practice with various languages and code complexities. I think I need to practice more programming problems in order to get a better understanding of how the code base works in a real project. But open source is very broad topic and writing code isn’t the only way to contribute I guess so I would definitely feel more confident in maybe writing documentation for the existing code base or doing research and finding more information about the subject matter. Also I need to learn more of git and github stuff because I had never known about version control system until now and it’s a key part of any project in general. I really need to learn all the commands and work my way around the project without messing up anything especially with the merging and rebasing. Another key part of contributing to open source is communication which I lack very bad. It’s rather difficult for me to reach out and ask questions or ask help from someone so it is a quality that I need to improve on. Even on the internet where I don’t see/know anyone, it’s quite hard for me to ask just the right questions and seek help from strangers. It’s probably because I’m afraid of humiliation if I ask dumb questions or that I might look stupid if I ask for help for even the simpliest of problems but it’s a real battle for me. So it’s definitely something that I have to over and improve on the most I think. And that’s pretty much it for this week. I have laid out all my insecurities in one post so have fun reading (now I’m questioning if it was a good idea to say all these things infront of people? sigh). That’s all for this week, thanks for checking in!