My first Open Source code contribution was on Ember around 2 months back. It felt pretty awesome and I was bragging about it in my teams Slack development group (and here :P). All that awesomeness was because, I had made a small contribution to a project / framework that was my daily driver for 2 complete years.
Overall, I was very happy.
I don't have many contributions yet, but my first one was to Faker library, I wrote Arabic localization for it - that includes handling specific cases for Arabic language -
I started learning more about meaning of open source by then, and I felt really excited when my PR was merged :)
I have yet to make my first contribution :(
I have only been learning to code for about 18mo. and feel like I know nothing at all. At the very least I suffer from intense imposter syndrome. I'm really afraid to embarras myself to be completely honest.
My first contribution was a bug fix in Laravel package srmklive/laravel-paypal
It felt nice as i finally contributed something to community.
My first open-source contribution was to FFmpeg, a toolkit for video and audio processing. I was trying to rip a DVD for my parents so that they could play it on their iPhone, and I was amazed by the lack of official documentation on such a simple task like re-encoding, and typos and mistakes that made reading docs even harder than it was. I thought it was within my ability to at least fix some of the obvious typos, and so I set out to do so.
With my fresh Ubuntu environment, I proceeded by cloning the tree and reading the page-long contribution guidelines. Even worse, English is not my first language, and a few years ago my English wasn't quite as good as it is right now. Reading this piece of document took me hours.
Alas, FFmpeg is one of those old-school C projects where everything is done through git format-patch, git send-email, and a Mailman mailing list (if you've never heard of these things, good). No GitHub or "pull requests" for me. It took me a long while to set everything up (from committer name to branches to email servers) and finally send out that patch to the mailing list. I had no previous experiences with Git, and I was so proud of achieving the feat of simply sending out the email.
That commit was speedily applied by one of the FFmpeg developers, and there you have it, my first ever OSS contribution. No, it wasn't a smooth experience. I didn't have the help of documentations in my native language, nor modern utilities such as GitHub pull request. But I did do something for other people, and the ability to do that was really empowering for me.
My first open source contribution was an instant answer plugin for DuckDuckGo search engine. It went live in 3 weeks. I was really happy to see that plugin available to millions of DuckDuckGo users.
You can learn more about how to contribute to DuckDuckGo here.
The most i do is about some gramatical tips in documentation and making some PR in GitHub, and was nice! In a future i want to try to collaborate to a big project like Symfony for example :)
Adam Wilson
Audio app developer
The first significant contribution was to the JUCE C++ framework, for some Android related additions to the project exporter. It felt great to have contributed to such an amazing framework. I've since contributed a few more patches to JUCE as well as to various React Native modules. Its a good feeling to be giving something back to the developer community.