For the self-taught developer and (or) pretty much all developers, we use open source projects in our daily code, with or without knowing.

For real though, Open Source (OS) projects have made our work easier and surprisingly fun.

TL;DR

My First Open Source Contribution

It is always hard to find what open source projects you'd love to contribute to, especially when you are a beginner, well that's why we mostly end up fixing the typos and eventually, making impressive contributions with time.

It's about time I shared my first experience. (A very short story).

I had been a member of the Facebook Developer Circles Nairobi for some time when the Open Source Immersion was announced.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/DevCNairobi/permalink/3374954279235348/

I googled on how to make contributions to the open-source, for the community. This was a simple case, what was needed was for community members to contribute to the Facebook Developers Circle Content repository . It was a cool one.

A summary of what I did:

Added a dev podcast link to the podcast list

Fix Merge conflicts (LOL)

Added blogs to the blogs list

Lessons learned:

The main thing I gained was how to contribute to an already existing project using git and GitHub. Fixing a merge conflict was the best one.