How I contributed to my first major open source 😁

Open source is a term that originally referred to open source software (OSS). Open source software is code that is designed to be publicly accessible—anyone can see, modify, and distribute the code as they see fit.

Sometime in May, I was working on this very interesting project that required payment integration with Flutterwave and Paystack. The techstack for this project was React with Typescript and I was using the very popular flutterwave-react-v3 npm package to enable ease of integration.

As part of the request payload, I was required to send subaccounts to the server to complete the flutterwave part of the integration. Sadly, subaccounts—though available, was not typescript supported in this package.

I tackled this by adding subaccounts support in my local node modules file for the library, which I tested and confirmed that it worked fine. Then I went about looking towards how to ensure it is made available online.

First, I took time to go through the contribution guidelines of the package. Then I raised an issue, forked the repo and raised a pull request (PR) to fix the issue. I didn't stop there😃, I also made sure to reach out to the original contributor via email and followed up with series of emails.

After about 2 weeks of emailing, my PR was merged and my latest change was released 🎉. Below are screenshots of my PR and me being listed as a contributor (the picture under Contributors)😁.

It was a very thrilling moment for me. To learn more about Open source, check out this link. Looking forward to more open source contributions!