Okay, so I saw some news about this “PR Open 2024” thing and I thought, “Why not give it a shot?” I mean, I’ve been messing around with coding for a while now, mostly just for fun and personal projects, you know? But this seemed like a cool opportunity to actually try something a bit more, uh, “official,” I guess.
So, first things first, I had to figure out what this whole “PR” thing even meant. Turns out, it stands for “Pull Request.” Basically, it’s like suggesting edits to someone else’s code project. I spent some time poking around online and reading some articles about how to participate in this event. A lot of information is kind of boring, but I got the general idea.
Find a project
The next step was to find a project that I could contribute to. I browsed through a bunch of different projects on this website. There were projects about everything you could imagine – games, tools, websites, you name it. It was a little overwhelming, to be honest. I wanted to find something that was interesting but not too complicated that a newbie like me could actually understand.
After a while, I finally stumbled upon a project that seemed pretty cool. It was a simple web app, and the maintainer has listed some easy tasks as “good first issues.” Perfect! Just what I was looking for.
Fork it!
So, I found my project. Then I had to figure out this whole “forking” thing. Turns out, forking is just making my own copy of the project’s code. I clicked the “Fork” button, and boom, I had my own version of the project to play around with.
Clone it to local
After forking, I needed to get the code onto my computer. That’s where “cloning” comes in. I used this Git thing to copy the project from the website to my local machine. It took a few tries to get the command right. I’m not gonna lie, the command line can be a bit intimidating.
Make changes
Now for the fun part – actually writing some code! I picked one of the “good first issues” from the project’s list. It was a small bug fix, but hey, gotta start somewhere, right? I opened up the code in my text editor and started tinkering. I actually managed to fix the bug! It was a pretty simple fix, but I felt like a total coding rockstar.
Commit the change and create a new branch
Once I was happy with my changes, I had to “commit” them. That’s basically like saving my work. I also created a new branch from my main branch. Then I wrote a little message explaining what I changed and why.
Push it
After committing, I needed to “push” my changes back to the website. This was another command-line adventure, but I eventually got it to work.
Create the pull request
Finally, the moment of truth. I went back to the original project’s page and clicked the “New Pull Request” button. I compared my branch to the main branch and entered the title. I wrote a short description of what I did, crossed my fingers, and submitted the pull request. And now… I wait. Hopefully, the project maintainer will like my changes and merge them into the main project. That would be pretty sweet.
Honestly, the whole process was a bit of a learning curve, but it was also kinda fun. Even if my pull request doesn’t get accepted, I still learned a lot. And hey, maybe I’ll try again with a different project. Who knows, maybe I’ll even become a regular open-source contributor. Wouldn’t that be something?
