My Journey Contributing to BLT

This is about how I started contributing to BLT, what caught my interest, what I've done so far, how it grew into me, and a few other things.

I was interested in contributing to open source for a long, long time. I did a few contributions in headlamp, mudlet, and meteor. I created an open source auth library as well, which I want to promote someday enough to attract contributors.

Anyways, things happened and I landed at Algora, which I felt was very cool as a tool. The architecture really attracted me, and after scrolling for a while, in around September, I found a tool that had this architecture under construction as one of its side features. That really just caught me. I instantly put in an introduction and asked for whatever task I could get my hands on to get into the ecosystem.

I started out with a BLT-on-Cloudfare project at the time, bug-reporting-system made on Cloudfare. I made that within a week — it was around 11k lines, I remember. Though it's just sitting on my Github even still, since we deviated into a different direction on the project. Post that, it's just been too much fun and learning.

I was a basic "full-stack dev" before contributing, but while contributing I've learned way too many security techniques, considerations, how infra works at scale, and specially how welcoming open source communities can be.

I started picking up as much work as I could from BLT for 2 months straight and tried to create some impact. I sat on the Slack what felt like 3/4th part of the day and hell, I was waiting for huddles as well.

It's very fun if I think about it — from being a part of a huddle where it was just me and Donnie, sitting and ending it within 5–7 minutes due to lack of breadth of things to catch up on — to now seeing the huddle go on for 1.5 hrs sometimes with a dozen members on average.

But yeah, BLT is basically what pulled me deeper into this hole of open source. Without any kind of barriers, you can interact directly with maintainers and show your work.

I started contributing a bit to one of Google's repositories as well, of which I liked the concept. But yeah, that's basically how I got into BLT and just been blessed to be a part ever since of such a good community with such a patient and welcoming mentor. I want to stick around enough to be a significant part of the community with a significant impact.

Ohh dear, reading this, it's kinda starting to sound like that emo AI slop to me, so I'll probably stop here.

Thanks for reading!