How I Landed a Spot in the Hall of Fame . My Open Source Journey with PrepNerdz

Varnika Sharma — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 20:52:23 +0000

I opened GitHub one morning and saw my face sitting next to the maintainer’s on a leaderboard.

That’s when it hit me, I had been featured in the Top Contributors Hall of Fame for the PrepNerdz project.

And that feeling?
Unreal.

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🤔 What’s PrepNerdz and Why Was I Even Contributing?

I’m currently a student contributor aiming for GSSoC’25, and I’d been diving deep into open source,submitting PRs, reading issues, and trying to learn by doing.

One of the repositories I came across was PrepNerdz, a full stack open platform helping students prep smarter.

What stood out was how active and beginner-friendly it felt like the maintainers wanted you to contribute. I took that energy and ran with it.

⸻

💻 What I Contributed

I submitted two major pull requests to the project:
• #11 – About Page Enhancements
Added gradient uniformity, animation polish, emojis, and an informative section
• #12 – Responsive Button Size Variants
Made buttons across the site truly responsive (small, medium, large), improving accessibility and UI logic

Both PRs were:
• Fully merged ✅
• Reviewed and approved by the repo maintainer himself ✅
• Written with clean code and proper descriptions ✅

⸻

💥 The Hall of Fame Moment

A few days later, I got tagged in this:
I was now officially one of the top contributors to PrepNerdz.

Did I expect it? Not at all.
But did it validate every single line of code I wrote? 100%.

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🎓 What I Learned Along the Way
• Your PR doesn’t have to be huge to be valuable
• Writing clean commit messages really matters
• Open source is less about code and more about community

I learned how to:
• Respect existing codebases
• Match repo structure and styling
• Communicate effectively on GitHub

⸻

🚀 Why This Matters (Beyond a Title)

That little “Hall of Fame” card gave me more confidence than any certificate could.

It reminded me that:

You don’t have to be perfect to be valuable.
You just have to show up consistently and care about what you’re building.

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💌 Final Words: If You’re a Beginner…

Just start.
Comment on an issue.
Read a README.
Ask dumb questions (I did).
Submit your first PR and learn from feedback.

You don’t need to be a 10x engineer.
You just need to act like you belong and slowly, you’ll become someone who does.

And maybe, just maybe…
You’ll land your own little place in someone’s Hall of Fame. 💫

⸻

📌 Connect with me on GitHub: @Varnika060306
🔗 View the repo: PrepNerdz on GitHub

DEV Community: Varnika Sharma

How I Landed a Spot in the Hall of Fame . My Open Source Journey with PrepNerdz