CNCF Zero-To-Merge: Becoming a Contributor(PART III)

Read Part II

CNCF COMMUNITIES

My experience so far with the CNCF Zero-To-Merge Incubator program has been nothing short of amazing. I have learned quite a lot about CNCF Landscape and how to navigate it.

CNCF has a goal to sustain projects, and understanding the landscape helps in navigating it. Our classes helped me bring to perspective the levels of the projects we have, and a rough idea of what to expect from these projects.

Working in Open Source is exhilarating because you get to build on the work others have done and others also get to build on yours. It is a literal representative of the phrase, “We rise by lifting others”.

MY CONTRIBUTION EXPERIENCE

I selected a project to contribute to (TAG) and another community to join(WASM CLOUD). My Contribution to TAG was easy to select, I found the issue among the issues on Clotributor, I went to their GitHub issues page and requested it be assigned to me.

The issue was about Documentation and we had a lot of conversations about how to resolve it, I enjoyed the process because it introduced me to the project in an easy way.

I felt encouraged to pick another issue, this time it was about code, I used GitHub spaces to open the repository in an IDE and I had to study the code base for some days before I figured out where the code I was looking for was located.

When I sent in my pull request, it was rejected because it did not follow a certain syntax. Does not mean I am going to give up tho. It just means I am going to try again.

In the process of this second contribution, I found another issue I want to work on next.

EXPECTATIONS

Before this program, I had expected contributions to take forever to get merged or assigned.

However that was not the case, my comments were responded to within 48 hours and there were active discussions around my contributions.

This reiterated the fact that in Open source communities, there’s always a process to doing things, code security and style are of great importance and people’s time is valuable hence exercise patience while waiting for a response.

CONCLUSION

Contributing to open-source projects is fun, you get to learn new software, and new ways of doing things, meet new people and you challenge yourself. It is an all-round positive experience.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation has a wide array of Open Source Projects to pick from and it is still growing.

As a DevOps Engineer, this program was very helpful to me. I’d miss our huddles, the chat and seeing Taylor on my screen frequently.