DEV Community: Payal's Space

The End of the Beginning, My Fedora Badges Contribution Journey

Payal's Space — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:12:19 +0000

There's something about endings that make you sit back and actually look at how far you've come.

The contribution period closes tomorrow and I find myself doing exactly that. Looking back at where I started, a Windows user who had never touched open source, never submitted a pull request, never been part of a community like this, and looking at where I am now. It feels good. Really good.

Where It All Started

I wrote about my first few days in my last blog post. The confusion, the tabs, the channels, not knowing where to look or who to talk to. What I didn't write about was what came after that, the part where things got hard in a different way.

Getting Fedora Badges running on my Windows machine was genuinely one of the most challenging things I did during this period. The setup instructions and guides are mostly Linux focused, and the mentors were clear from the very beginning that Linux is the requirement for this project. I was working against the grain and I knew it. There were moments where I genuinely didn't know if I'd get it working.

But when it finally ran on my system, when I saw the badges application live in my browser after all of that, I remember just sitting there for a second. That felt like an achievement. Not a small one either.

The Contributions

My first two PRs were removing legacy CSS and JS files that were tied to the old Jinja2 templates and had no connection to the new React frontend. Simple in concept but not without lessons.

I initially targeted the wrong branch. So I had to go back, redo them correctly on swatantrya and resubmit. Then came the signing issue. I thought I had signed my commits correctly but the mentor pointed out that the Signed-off-by line wasn't actually showing in the commit message. I tried amending but didn't do it quite right. It took some back and forth before I understood exactly what git commit -s does and how to use it properly. That small thing taught me more about git hygiene than anything I'd read before.

Both PRs eventually got merged. So did a third one. Three merged pull requests. When I look at my GitHub profile now I can see my first pull request, my first merged contribution, my first good issue label. Firsts are always special and these ones I'm going to remember.

I also have one PR still open and under review which I'm hoping lands soon.

Reviewing Someone Else's Work

One thing I didn't expect to do during this period was review another contributor's PR. The mentors encouraged everyone to step forward and review each other's work and I took that seriously.

It was my first time reviewing code in an open source project. Looking at someone else's contribution, understanding what they did, thinking about whether it made sense, that's a completely different skill from writing code yourself. It made me more careful about my own work too.

What the Mentors Gave Us

The mentors here are genuinely experienced and it shows in everything they share. From how to think about AI tooling, to how open source communities work, to what good contributions actually look like. None of it felt like rules being handed down. It felt like people who had been through this for years sharing what actually matters.

The dictionary and book analogy about AI stuck with me. You can use it to understand, but the work has to be yours. Simple but it reframes everything.

[ Mentors Akashdeep Dhar (gridhead) and Shounak Dey. You can find them on GitHub. ]

How It Feels

Productive. That's the word that keeps coming back to me.

Not just in a "I got things done" way but in a deeper sense, like I was spending my time on something that actually mattered. Being around people who care about what they're building, who give honest feedback, who encourage you to try things you haven't tried before, that's rare.

This is my first open source experience. My first real pull request. My first contribution that lives in a real codebase that real people use. Fedora Badges is going to be the thing I point to when someone asks me where I started.

And honestly, for a first, I couldn't have asked for better.

One thing worth mentioning is that even though the official contribution period is closing, Outreachy allows contributions to be recorded until April 30th. And honestly I don't see myself stopping anyway. I've already started looking into a small feature update and plan to keep contributing. Not because I have to but because I'm genuinely invested in seeing this project move forward now. Once you care about something it's hard to just switch that off.

Whatever comes next, I'm glad I showed up.

Finding My Way into Fedora, One Tab at a Time

Payal's Space — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 10:19:19 +0000

I just wrapped up an internship. The kind where you're heads down for months, learning fast, shipping things, and barely coming up for air. The day it ended, I remember sitting back and thinking, okay, what now?

That's when Outreachy found me. Or maybe I found it. Either way, the timing felt right. I applied with little expectation, honestly not thinking much would come of it. Then I got selected for the contribution round and suddenly it was real.

I started browsing through the projects and came across the Fedora Badges revamp and something about it just clicked. Not in a "this looks good for my resume" way. More like, this is real work, on a real system, that real people use. That felt different.

Wait, What Even Is Fedora?

I'll be honest, before this, I had absolutely no idea Fedora existed. I'm a Windows user through and through, but Linux was always something I genuinely wanted to get into. It lived on my "someday" list for the longest time. I just never had a real reason to dive in until now. So Fedora wasn't just a new project for me, it was finally that door I'd been meaning to walk through.

And that's actually what made it interesting. There's something about coming in with zero assumptions that forces you to really understand things rather than just fill in blanks with what you think you already know.

Fedora is a free and open source Linux operating system, yes. But more than that it's a global community of people, developers, designers, translators, writers, all building something together. It was born in 2003, originally as a collaboration between Red Hat and volunteers, and has since grown into one of the most innovative Linux distributions out there. New technologies, new kernel features, new desktop environments, often land in Fedora first before anywhere else. It's where things get tried, tested and refined.

What surprised me most is how much of what we use in enterprise Linux today started as an experiment inside Fedora. It's upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, meaning things proven here eventually make their way into production systems used by companies worldwide. There's something quietly powerful about that.

The First Few Days, Finding My Footing

The first few days after joining were honestly just me trying to figure out where I even was. Sign up here, join this channel, that mailing list, this matrix room, that repository. The Fedora community is vast, and I mean genuinely vast, in a way that's impressive but also quietly overwhelming when you're standing at the door with no map.

I spent more time than I'd like to admit just navigating between tabs, trying to understand which space was for what and who I was supposed to talk to. Nobody tells you that the first step in open source isn't writing code. It's just figuring out where the conversation is happening.

But once things started clicking, once I found the right channel, read the right thread, sat in the first meeting, it started to feel less like a maze and more like a neighbourhood I was slowly learning my way around.

The Badges Project and Why It Matters

One of the first things I explored was Fedora Badges, a platform that recognises and rewards community contributions. Packaging code? Badge. Attending an event? Badge. Helping someone in the forums? Badge.

It sounds simple but the idea behind it is genuinely thoughtful. Open source can feel invisible sometimes. You contribute and nothing really acknowledges it. Fedora Badges tries to change that. It makes contribution visible, tangible, even a little fun.

The current project I'm applying to work on is a complete revamp of this system, modernising the backend, rebuilding the frontend in React, and adding something really exciting, MCP support, which means AI assistants will be able to interact with the badges system directly. It's the kind of work that sits at the intersection of community, infrastructure and modern AI tooling, which honestly describes exactly where my interests are.

Being an AI Developer Walking Into This

I work with AI. Python is my comfort zone. So when I read through the project and saw the MCP server architecture planned, a way for AI assistants to query and interact with badge data, I felt like I already had a language to speak in here.

But the mentors made something very clear in our first meeting that I want to be honest about. Using AI to write your contributions is not allowed. You can use it to understand things, the way you'd use a dictionary to look up a word. But the actual work, the thinking, the implementation, the decisions, that has to come from you.

As someone who works in AI, I actually respect that stance a lot. It's easy to let a tool do the thinking for you. It's harder, and more valuable, to understand something deeply enough that you could explain it to someone else. That's what this project is asking for and I think that's the right ask.

What's Ahead

I'm still early in this journey. I'm going through the codebase, understanding how the Flask backend and the React frontend talk to each other, looking at open issues, getting familiar with how contributions work in a community this size.

It's a lot to take in. But I haven't felt stuck. I've felt curious, which is a different thing entirely.

If you're curious to explore Fedora yourself, the best place to start is simply the Fedora Project website at fedoraproject.org. If you want to get involved with the Badges project specifically, the main conversation is happening on Matrix at chat.fedoraproject.org in the #badges:fedoraproject.org room. That's where contributors, mentors and applicants are all actively discussing things. The codebase lives on GitHub under fedora-infra and is open for anyone to explore.

Don't overthink the entry point. Just show up, read for a bit, and say hello.

I'll be sharing more as I go. There's a lot more to learn and I'm just getting started.