As I wanted to escape out of tutorial hell I wanted to implement my skills into some industrial projects. So I found out open source was the best way to do it and now I'll be sharing my experience of that wonderful journey.

Finding an Organization

• I looked out on various YouTube channels on how to do my first open source contribution and found this Video to be helpful.

• To find the organization in which I wanted to contribute was tricky I sticked to gsoc website for finding organizations and decided to contribute to checkstyle which was a Java project.

Setting up project locally and finding an issue

• I set up the project locally using > git clone github.com/checkstyle/checkstyle

• Also followed this documentation

• Then I found this gsoc_first_issue to work on.

Making PR

• I followed the steps in this documentation to make a pull request in the repository and after constant mind boggling because of the errors faced my got merged into the master branch successfully.

• I took around a 14 days to successfully make my pull request.

Common version control error that occurred

• The project demands you to make only one commit per pull request so if you make more number of commits you need to squash it to one and you can do so by following this article

• Make sure to write proper PR messages and commit messages by following this link

Final Thoughts

• So far the journey has been amazing and quite challenging. Hope to do even more contributions to the organization in the future which would add more value.

Hope you enjoyed reading the article🎉