Everything I learned | Month 3| Encora/Nearsoft Academy

Hi everyone! 🤗

Here’s another special edition blog post of what I learned in the third phase of the Academy program, my favorite one so far. I’ve learned a lot by working on open source projects and I have some interesting insights into how this phase helped me to become a better Software Engineer.

— — — 🦈Open Source Projects🦈— — —

As I’ve already stated, this was my favorite phase of the Academy program, because I was able to learn many things in just a few weeks as well as meeting amazing people in the community. But not everything was rainbows and sugar. 🥧

Since the beginning of the phase, I thought it will be easy to pick and choose an issue within the vast quantity of repositiores available to contribute in Github; I had experience contributing. Nevertheless, it was by provding translations to the python documentation, which will not count as a valid issue this phase.

To my surprise, finding a coding issue is not as easy as it seems due to different situations, like being to easy that the mantainesrs solved them by themeselves and not ending available for everyone, or the issue being assigned to someone else in just a few minutes after it was published, and even the thievery of others by publishing a pull request solving the issue you got assigned, didn’t happened to me, but it did to some friends in the Academy program. 🥷

Also, the quantity of new commers to hunt down “good first issue” lables is very large, and sometimes you got to choose more difficult issues to get something. That happened to me, instead of finding a good first issue, I went for a little more difficult one without the tag.

But, even before of choosing an issue to solve, I think that the most important thing to considerate in order to choose one, is the quality of the repository by the work implementing their issues , pull requests, and process of contribution. If they have them well define, the repository is an amazing place to start, even if the issues are not easy for newcommers, because you would have the help necessary to progress.

Small details make the difference

But, as a lesson I had to learn in the hard way, do not fly near the sun. If the issue is too difficult to understand or contribute, do others before falling in the rabbit hole.

— — — ⛰ Final Thoughts ⛰ — — —

One of the most important insights I had working with open source projects is the amazing work done by the mantainers, they have work on their backlog, review pull and issue requests, as well as helping other developers with their own issues. Thank you for your amazing work.

If you have time to check out their repostiories, contribute or donate to their work. Feel free to visit them:

wemake-services/wemake-python-styleguide

OpenDiablo2/HellSpawner

wtfutil/wtf

Thank you for reading until here!

See you! 👋🏽