Okay so first of all — thanks a lot for reading this.
Probably you are expecting me to do something with the sl command, according to what I promised last time...
In the next post, I’ll finally start modifying the train — maybe make it rainbow-colored or emoji-powered 🚂
Well, I flipped 😅
So this time I was away from code since my excitement to explore made me wander in the Ubuntu and GNOME community — Matrix chats, GitLab issues and discussions — which made me realize that code is just half the game, the other half is community interaction!
The silence:
This exam week felt longer than it actually was, I mean time went a bit too slow for me.
So I had 7 exams this semester and almost every exam went in a not-so-good way 😅
I studied hard starting from 2 days before the exams and during the exams. I also watched a movie the evening my last exam finished 😆. And finally I am back to my routine of exploring Ubuntu and documenting it!
Work in the silence:
During this period of silence where I did not write blogs and my exams weren't there (yeah, my exams finished just a week ago but I am also talking about the few days before the exam 🫠), I did not sit idle — I went to Google, ChatGPT and GitHub to look for what the Ubuntu community does and how they do it. So I searched about their contribution flow, it is fairly simple but yet difficult to wrap my head around since I never saw such a flow before 😅.
I haven't understood everything and I know it (and you'll know it too when you read below 😅), but please feel free to correct me in the comments!
The general flow goes like this:
- You go to GitHub and clone their repo
- You first create an issue stating the problem or bug or whatever you found and add a comment saying "Please assign this issue to me" (not so sure on how you convince the maintainer though 😅)
- You wait for the maintainer to assign the issue to you
- When the issue is assigned to you, you start working on the fix
- First you discuss about the fix in the issue comment
- There will be some response from the community, when that happens, you iterate and ideate
- Once everyone agrees that you have a good idea, you implement it and push it in a new branch
- Once pushed, create a pr (pull request) and attach the pr link in the issue comment
- Let the community check your code, wait for testing to happen and improve on feedback
- That's it, once they finish their testing, they will merge the pr themselves (maybe, I have yet to figure this out since online sources don't tell me exactly this 😅)
So now you have an open source contribution in your name! And that too merged! But as usual there's a ton of pitfalls 🥲
Firstly, if your issue is too big it might not even get accepted, leave alone getting assigned to you. So yeah I cannot directly open a pr saying 'Redesign the emoji picker', they'll just close the pr as if nothing happened!
Secondly, this flow is approximately the general flow, it differs from project to project 🥲 — confusing, I know it, but helps get somewhere at least.
So according to the online sources and some ChatGPT help I found that I should contribute to smaller issues and the community actually helps with those, there's issues with tags and for beginners like me, the 'good-first-issue' tag works great since it lets me contribute as well as gets me introduced to the community!
So reading Ubuntu's docs, I found Matrix
Credits: giphy
Not this one though 😂. Matrix is a platform which I found similar to discord but the only difference is that the Ubuntu community uses that (couldn't find more 😅).
So as a newcomer who was very anxious, I stared at the chat for straight 30 minutes just thinking what should be my first message. Finally I thought about this:
Hello everyone! I’m Meet, and I’m very new to open source contributions. I came across a couple of “good first issues” in the Open Documentation Academy repo, but I’m not fully sure how to get started with them.
Could someone guide me on which one might be more suitable for a beginner, or how I should begin exploring them?
These are the issues I found:
https://github.com/canonical/open-documentation-academy/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aopen%20label%3A%22good%20first%20issue%22%20no%3AassigneeThank you!
And after this I waited for a day or so until someone really replied! And just by seeing the notification I got too overjoyed 😅
So the reply was what you'd expect, they pointed out an issue saying this is something good you can try, but it really felt amazing to me at that moment 😁
This was 2 days before my first exam though 🙂 — I just got a bit toooo bored I guess 😅
But after my exams finished I explored the contribution related to that emoji picker (which, unfortunately for me, is a lot better in Ubuntu version 24 than it was in version 22) and I found that GNOME is actually the UI engine that runs in Ubuntu. I also found that the name "Emoji Picker" that I been calling it is actually an app called the Characters App and it handles all this. So I thought for a bit and then created an account in GitLab, had the tokens and everything setup and cloned the repo in GNOME Builder app (which is pre-installed in Ubuntu just like the Characters App).
After cloning, I went to GitLab and saw the open issues and started scanning the issue titles. I found two issues which I thought I could contribute to first issue and second issue. Then I searched for tags (searching how to search via tags was a different battle in itself for me 😅) and found this issue where newcomers could join in.
So I decided to go with the second issue 🤓. I commented in the issue saying that this bug does not exist in my system — except, I did not give any system specs 😅. But surprisingly, the issue had another comment in 2 days saying it is still glitchy in some other machine (and this guy gave specs). So because of me an issue that was inactive since 2 months finally started to have a conversation going on.
The chat went on for 3-4 days, not a long one though, and the issue was first closed and then reopened because they found a bug! And yeah, I am thinking of contributing to fixing that bug...
Just after doing the "this" contribution 😅
So finally I am a bit confident about my step of going into the open-source world of GNOME and Ubuntu but I am just as anxious 😅
Can't wait to see what's next though 😁
What this taught me
This experience taught me something better, sometimes there are a lot of things which cannot happen without people collaborating and talking on it or maybe even arguing if necessary and I hope to be a part of at least one argument 😁 (even if just once).
Not touching code taught me a lot of human perspective in the open-source world now let's see what touching code can teach me 😂
But anyone who is reading this maybe for starting from scratch like me, I just want to tell you, it is better to understand the community before we can begin to understand the Kernel 🙂
Conclusion
Thanks a ton for the time mate! I really appreciate you came until here, stay tuned till the next time where I might code and even help with some issues! Super excited yet somehow nervous 😁
Just love the open-source vibes!
Credits: tenor
Top comments (1)
Nice work 🐧