I was introduced to Open Source in tenth grade during Google Code-In 2019, since then I’m always amazed by it — how developers, designers, testers work together to build free software useful for everyone all over the globe.

I came across the Anitab.org community through the same program but GitHub was a bit overwhelming at first and I didn’t make my first pull request to any of the community’s projects until May 2020.

Today I’m going to share my first contribution to the Mentorship System, one of my favorite projects at Anitab.org.

What is Mentorship System?

Mentorship System is an application that matches women in tech to mentor each other, on career development, through 1:1 relations during a certain period.

Tech Stack: the backend of the project is written in Python(flask) and the frontend which is an android application is written in Kotlin.

My experience

So, I started setting up the project locally by following very clear guidelines. It was completed successfully some three hours later, which is a real-time long mostly because I had just started learning python and had to find solutions for dozens of errors on StackOverflow.

If I have to set up the project now it can be done in ten minutes!

Next, I read the contribution guidelines and started looking for the issues labeled as

“First Timers Only” and found a simple one that needed the “ __repr__ “ strings used in the code changed to the f-strings format and decided to work on that as I was aware of both string formats. I commented on the issue and waited for it to be assigned to me.

Then as mentioned in the contribution guidelines I created a new branch, made the changes locally, committed them, and created my first pull request!

I remember modifying only 3 files from the code fixing the issue but on the PR I was shocked to see other files like virtual environment, pip files, etc… I had no idea how it happened, I thought it was some virus infecting my laptop and was about the delete my GitHub account too, which seems very funny a year later today.

Thanks to Isabel I got to know that I had committed all files changed using the command git add . instead of adding only the specific modified files and there wasn’t any virus there.

After a few more tweaks, the pull request finally had two approving reviews, it was ready to be tested. Once the testing was done by Isabel, my very first PR to the repository was merged! I was on cloud nine till at least a week later from the day the pull request was merged. Since then, have worked on issues from documentation, outreach, UI, and quality assurance.

From not knowing how to add files using git to becoming one of the project maintainers for mentorship-backend, it’s been a long way and I would like to thank all admins and the organization members at Anitab.org for their guidance and help throughout :)

Here’s my first contribution: https://github.com/anitab-org/mentorship-backend/pull/651

Conclusion

If you haven’t contributed to open source before, I recommend you give it a try.

It’s fun, it’s rewarding, and it’s good for the career.

You can find me on GitHub, LinkedIn, and my website.

My first Open Source contribution was originally published in AnitaB.org Open Source on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.