How did I bag my first Technical Writing assignment

My Background

I started my Open Source journey in February 2022. My GitHub contribution chart shows 197 contribution this year. We are still in first week of December. I am bound to make the count 200.

Grabbing the opportunity

Coming from a coding background, it was easy to contribute code to open source projects than documentation. I came across Airbyte’s Docs Contributor Program just when I was looking for mentorship and guidance. I did not waste anytime in submitting my application. I had written a few articles on freeCodeCamp and had an active GitHub profile. A week later I got an email, stating that I was selected in the program. Next, I had to schedule a meeting with the mentor to understand my project.

The following evening I had one to one conversation with my mentor. She shared with me a list of GitHub issues, and asked me to pick a project that interested me. The task was to rewrite an existing documentation. I was familiar with Docker, so I picked the project to Rewrite the Airbyte Kubernetes Deployment Guide. I was nervous when the mentor said, I had picked a lengthy documentation that would require a lot of work. I was thrilled when the she said my project had the largest bounty. I was going to make money from open source for the first time. As soon as our meeting ended, I got an email with all the minutes of our discussion.

Success of my first technical writing project

I followed a series of steps when working on the writing project:

1. I walked myself through the existing documentation. I deployed Airbyte on Kubernetes, made notes of changes I wanted to do in the existing documentation.

2. I wrote my first draft in Google Word Document. It received around 80-100 comments. Most of them were about reframing sentences (you can check in the version history yourself), and restructuring the document.

3. Finally, I made the Pull Request after making sure that all the commments from the Word Document was added to the PR. I was familiar with Markdown language, so it was easy to convert the Google Document to a .md file.

4. My Pull Request review was smooth and it was merged successfully.

Few tips to make your open source journey easy

1. Learn GitHub - This advice must come to you all the time. It is so, because GitHub is a crucial skill. You cannot contribute to open source unless you know your GitHub right. Learn the basic commands like: cloning a project, creating a new branch, committing your code, merging code, etc.

2. Find a mentor - It is easy to find an issue you can contribute to but difficult to find a mentor. As a beginner, find a project where maintainers have the bandwidth to mentor you. I usually stick around projects where I get guidance and mentorship.

3. Keep your expectations low - Remember, maintainers are not obliged to guide you. If you expect their mentorship, make it worth their while. Make some significant contributions. Stick around for a while. Try and take their workload off. They are not getting paid to teach you the ropes. Respect their time.

4. Find the right project - Open Source is a sea of projects. Find the project that fits you right. A projects that suits your expertise, time zone, technologies you want to learn. Use the Github Explore section to search your projects.

5. Ask questions - One of the reasons why beginner contributors do not succeed in open source is, they are afraid of asking questions. There is nothing wrong in asking well researched questions. Read the documentation of the project, Google your doubts before asking questions, then put forth your question in Slack, Discord, Gitter or whatever communication channels the community uses.

Signing off...

I am learning technical writing, working on my first AI project, and contributing to Jenkins project (you can read me Jenkins experience on their blog).

One of the reasons why I love contributing to open source is: it gives freedom. Freedom to pick and drop projects, freedom to contribute at your convenience, freedom to learn technologies of your choice. Also, I communicate with people all over the world, and learn from maestros of the field.

Thank you for reading.